Blackjack Wayward

Part Four

Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness





Chapter Thirty-Six

From the time we arrived at Superdynamic’s Mali base to the moment we boarded the Cicada for our return flight, three hours and fifty minutes had passed. In that time, I had insulted or offended just about every member of his team, scared a young botanist half to death, and damn near gotten Focus killed.

Not too bad, considering it’s me.

In the time it had taken me to alienate everyone at the tower, Superdynamic’s people installed an additional seat and workstation for me. It was a bit cramped with the low-sloping roof at the rear of the Cicada; but it was nice to know they were thinking about me, and it was more comfortable than the rickety fold-out seat I had on the trip out. I had a fully functioning computer console and a Blackjack-sized leather chair to research Lord Mighty on the three-hour trip.

Mighty kept his life a secret, but there were theories. Hell, there were enough books, blogs, and magazines based on those theories to fill a library, and I had the flight time between Timbuktu, Mali and Washington, D.C., U.S.A. to burn. Some people believed that Mighty had been part of Dr. Retcon’s Original Seven: Lady Jayne, Valiant, Global, Apostle, Ed Watters, Nostromo, and Retcon himself, but that was the supposition least supported by evidence. Mighty’s power level was the only thing that lent it any credence. It was thought to be on par with any of the Original Seven, but that was all based on conjecture. I didn’t have a quantitative analysis of Mighty’s strength and endurance as compared to, say, Global or Nostromo, or even to Valiant, whose power set was nearest to his. It was all theory and bullshit, and half of Lord Mighty’s rep was based on his confident, even magnanimous, personality.

Others surmised a background in acting, with some claiming that Mighty had left behind a career as a stuntman and body double to Steve Reeves, the 1950s sword & sandal movie star. He was somehow exposed to one of the Seven for an extended period of time, making him most famous of the second wave of heroes and villains.

That theory took into account his classic looks and the old-school costume. The timing also matched. He’d been active for fifty years, unaffected by aging; in fact, he appeared younger and more vibrant with each passing decade.

Prior to Hashima, Lord Mighty had disappeared for a few years, but my theory on that was that there were no major villains to beat, no worldwide calamity to resolve. Most of his nemeses were dead, incarcerated, or retired, like my friend Black Razor, and there were no challenges left. Razor’s mind was a fragile place, and these days he was more of a threat to soil himself. Mighty felt it beneath him to stop bank robbers or terrorists, and he’d left the world behind.

I first met him on Hashima, and only Nostromo’s word had kept him from taking our fledgling group apart. If it took something as drastic as the return of Retcon to pull him out of seclusion, then what could have driven him to throw his lot in with Zundergrub, as a villain of all things?

After the first hour at high speed, everyone settled in, and I recognized their routine of trying to keep their minds busy and off the impending battle. Moe’s head swayed slightly to music blaring from his ear buds as he played solitaire on the console. Ruby texted away, her fingers almost a blur, no doubt updating her Facebook page and responding to her fans on Twitter. Templar read a bible, oblivious to the world, and Focus had her back turned to me, but she also looked to be praying or meditating. Closest to me was Ricochet, who fell asleep halfway across the Atlantic while watching a 1960s vintage Ultraman movie.

At the helm, Superdynamic guided us, steering the ship through dense cloud cover. He was taking us higher to avoid the turbulence in slow, sweeping maneuvers designed to ease the ship aloft without causing discomfort. Mirage was in the co-pilot’s chair, monitoring radio chatter out of D.C. I listened to the same channel for a while, but it was almost impossible to discern who was friend and who was foe.

I could tell that Americans were fighting Americans in street-to-street skirmishes, with both sides taking heavy casualties. From what I could understand, General Maxwell, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had assembled a defensive perimeter around D.C. proper using several Army and Marine divisions. They set up an elaborate bunker system adjacent to Interstate 495, the “Capital Beltway” that surrounded the inner suburbs and most major government buildings, advancing into the central parts of the city early this morning and surrounding the White House.

Maxwell had unleashed his mecha into the city, and they were systematically destroying the few defending forces the President and Congress had been able to muster. The fighting was now reduced to guys with pistols against mechanized infantry and armored robots.

I brought up some footage from earlier today of a mecha roaming the streets of D.C. on my console. From time to time, the thing would stop, raise one of its arms, bristling with missiles and cannon, and take a shot. Surrounded by fire and smoke, the mecha trudged along like Godzilla trampling the city underfoot.

Opposing Maxwell and his army were a patchwork of cobbled-together forces led by General Chester Allan Hinds, a grizzled veteran commander, best known for his service in Kosovo with the United Nations mission back in the 1990s. But like most wartime situations, the cream rose to the top, through either luck or circumstance; the news said he had been vacationing with his wife in the nation’s capital when Maxwell’s forces struck. General Hinds had taken command of the opposing forces and now engineered the push into the city. The stalemate between his and Maxwell’s forces on the outer ring of the city gave the latter all the time in the world to take the White House.

That was exactly where Apogee with the new derivation of her group, the Revolution, could be found, fighting for their lives in a desperate final stand. This new version of the team boasted some powerful heroes, including the underdeveloped child-menace Jasper, the density controller Damage, the mind-controller Dominus, Snaps with his deadly disintegration powers, the walking rockpile known as Mount Fuji, and the diva called Bamma, who was Apogee’s rival for the title of sexiest super heroine. It was a complement powerful enough to hold off Maxwell and hundreds of rogue villains. I only hoped they would last long enough for us to arrive and turn the tide.

As far as what Lord Mighty was doing, no one knew. He could end the dispute in an instant, but as of yet, he hadn’t made his presence known. Maybe he was Zundergrub’s contingency plan.

“Everyone switch to channel 29,” Superdynamic said.

Moe made the change and disconnected his headset so I could hear.

It was an Al Jazeera newscast, with a lone reporter accompanied by a military advisor.

“...almost ready for broadcast. I’m told that we received this shortly, and again, the contents of which we haven’t yet ascertained. We can say that this is a recorded message from the President herself, though how recent we can’t say.”

“If I can jump in, Eric,” said the other man, a severe-looking fellow who wore a U.S. Air Force uniform, with the gold oak leaves insignia denoting his rank as Major. “One thing we do know is that the whole D.C. area is under some sort of jamming, so ... well, what we got was a video that the President managed to upload to the Internet using hard lines. Our producers have seen the video, or at least part of it, and can verify that this is a message from the President herself.”

“Yeah, I think everyone watching can understand this is a developing story. We’re literally bringing you the news as soon as it comes to us. Is it ready yet?” Eric said, speaking to someone off-screen. “Almost?”

“From what I understand, we’ve had to re-encode the whole video to a format we can broadcast, and that takes some time.”

“That’s right.”

“It should be ready momentarily.”

“And just to recap for our viewers: forces led by General Taylor Maxwell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, rolled into the capital two days ago, tanks, helicopters, armed soldiers, surrounding the city and keeping anyone from entering or leaving the inner district. From the last reports, the forces defending the capital are comprised of members of the FBI, local authorities, and a small group of Virginia Military Institute cadets who happened to be at the White House during the initial assault. Loss of life is hard to tell, but the images we’re getting from across the Potomac are disheartening, reminiscent of Sarajevo or Mogadishu, as Major Kozlanski here can attest to.”

“I can, Eric. I can, and it breaks my heart to see the capital of the country I served for thirty-two years and....” the Major paused, swallowing hard. “I just couldn’t have imagined this....” He covered his mouth and couldn’t go on.

Eric jumped in. “I think that everyone watching shares your sentiment, Major, in saying that no one could have ever envisioned–” he stopped, cuffing his ear. “We’re ready? Okay folks, here’s the unedited video as we received it.”

The screen switched to a pixelated image of the President, wearing a dark blue suit with a flag pin attached to the lapel. The only sign that she might be under duress was that the video seemed taken in a dimly lit hallway, more akin to a captive held by terrorists. Her salt-and-pepper hair was pulled back in a bun, like usual, but frayed and a bit disheveled, and odd fit considering her usually flawless appearance. When the video switched to her, she was mid-sentence, talking over the reporter.

“–to report to all of our allies abroad, and to those who might take notice, we are still holding out and we will continue to do so as long as we have strength. We are heartened by the presence of several supers here, including Red Badger, Anima, Precog, Cirrus and the supergroup the Revolution, among many others who have sought refuge in what remains of the White House. We’ve been given a momentary reprieve by the assaulting forces, which include many of the villains who escaped from Utopia prison last month. And for some reason, Lord Mighty has switched sides and now stands against us.”

She paused, looking down at some notes.

“But now is not the time to be disheartened, now is not the time to doubt your country. We are in touch with untainted forces that are even now making progress to relieve us, and hope that they are soon to break through the enemy lines. More importantly, I want to let the American people know that we will stand and fight, and in the end we will prevail. To paraphrase the words of one of our greatest presidents: ‘We here highly resolve that this nation, under God, shall not be lost to tyranny, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’ I thank you and join in all your prayers for our nation in this most perilous hour, and know that if God be just, then we cannot fail. Thank you and God bless America.”

The video cut to black and the image switched to Portland and Major Kozlanzki, whose comments Moe shut off by lowering the sound.

“Now we know what we’re facing, “ Superdynamic said from the cockpit.

If the President was still broadcasting from the White House, then I had reason to believe that Apogee was still alive and fighting. The footage was recent and clean, with the President sitting in a medium shot with the seal of the office behind her. She was letting the nation, and the world, know that they did not intend to surrender. They fought for the future of the country.

Her speech hit all the right notes to calm the populace, mobilize supporters, and allay foreign worries. Zundergrub’s primary goal in destabilizing the U.S.A. was to make them a target for military and economic aggression from China, Iran, and North Korea. Anyone holding a grudge or feeling ambitious was receiving a clear message: “Now’s the time to strike.”

Even if we were successful today and managed to beat Zundergrub and his cronies, fight off the military, and win the day, the real task would be recovering all the traction lost in the past few days, the trillions of dollars lost in the markets, and repairing bonds between nations that lay close to tatters. That was Zundergrub’s endgame, to throw the world into chaos. That would lead to the end of civilization, perhaps even the extinction of humanity. It was mankind he hated, not the planet, not its flora and fauna. That’s why he couldn’t just take over the American nuclear arsenal and unleash it on Russia or China, knowing that between the first strike and the retaliation, most of the world would be annihilated. If he did that, he might ensure the destruction of man, but the cost to his dear little fishies was more than Zundergrub could bear. Destabilization would accomplish the destruction of the world order, bring the downfall of both U.S.A. and China, the world’s worst polluters, and perhaps introduce a new paradigm wherein he could affect change easier. He was patient and organized, and this was the first part of his grand design.

The doctor’s problem was that he hated progress, he hated civilization. Zundergrub longed for a simpler time, much like his childhood in northern India. A tribal life, less burdened with the world-integrating effects of technology; something more akin to the small village in Shard World, the one time he had found bliss.

I turned to my console and brought up the video of Gen. Maxwell’s speech, turning the volume all the way down. As soon as the camera pulled back at the end, revealing Dr. Zundergrub, I paused it. There was a smile on his face, smug in the satisfaction that his plan was soon to bear fruit. In fact, word from foreign news sources was that Russia was mobilizing most of their western forces along their border and already rolling into the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Chechnya, and Ukraine. The Russians weren’t waiting to see what was happening in the U.S. before taking steps to “reacquire” their former territories. China was taking a more passive attitude, putting their armed forces on alert and going so far as to send a large fleet to patrol Taiwan and Hong Kong under the guise of “exercises,” but they were otherwise making no overtly hostile acts.

And there Zundergrub stood, dwarfed by the dozens of colonels and generals from Gen. Maxwell’s command staff, but with a grin so wide and complete that it was apparent he was already celebrating, if only inwardly. If our country fell, if the President died and Gen. Maxwell could take the White House, he would have the military strength to finalize the coup de tat by the nature of positional mandate, that is, owning the capital. He could sue for peace from the rest of the U.S. armed forces, and Zundergrub could turn any opposing forces to allies by virtue of his powers.

But I didn’t think that would placate Zundergrub.

If the coup was successful, Russia and China might misbehave a little, the world markets might partially collapse, but the new sense of stability would bring calm to the planet, and a hope that things would even out, even return to normal. The President wouldn’t be missed for long, nor would her successor take long to come on the stage and help calm down world concerns, and that was in opposition to Zundergrub’s ultimate goal.

No, this was only the first step. Zundergrub would either keep rolling the army, perhaps up the coast toward New York City, and mobilize American assets abroad. Keep the civil war mobile and bloody. Maybe the bastard wasn’t all that squeamish about using submarine-based nukes. The loss of a little plant and animal life might be an acceptable cost for eradicating all humans on the planet.

He had to be stopped, and we were the last few heroes who could make a difference.

Superdynamic brought me out of my thoughts by putting the ship on autopilot and walking back to the main deck.

“ETA three minutes,” he said, adding, “Moe,” and the big man took off his headsets and stood. The rest of the team also came to their feet, and as best they could, began to take each other’s hands to form a haphazard ring around the consoles, until I was the only man out. Focus reached out with her hand and nodded when I hesitated. I took her hand and Ruby’s, and Moe began.

“Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech you, of your great capacity for mercy and love, and thank you that we are together with our friends and loved ones in this moment of great difficulty. We ask you to guide us and watch over us, and should any of our company fall in the battle that is to come, we beg for your loving kindness, and pray that we may have been your tools of righteousness in this great conflict of good and evil. We ask you in Jesus’ name. Amen.”

Before we broke the circle, I saw Focus staring at me with her hand clenched tight. They had patched her up, and if she was bothered or in pain, I couldn’t tell. Once we were done, she nodded to me and turned back.

“One second,” Superdynamic said, before everyone could return to their seats. “I have something to ask you, Blackjack.”

He stepped into the middle and walked right up to me.

“I need to know something,” he continued. “I’ve seen you in action a couple of times, and I know you can handle yourself. But I want to know if you’re going to work with us, or just run off and hotdog it.”

“What?”

Superdynamic smiled. “I’m not trying to power-trip here, or show off for the team, you understand? I need to know if you’re with us,” he said motioning to the team. They were all looking at me.

“Yeah,” I said, crossing my arms. “Of course.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah!”

“Ok, because working as a team means we work together, we help each other, and most importantly, we follow orders.”

I noticed how defensive I looked and let myself relax, dropping my arms to the side.

“I’m cool with that, man. I’ll follow your lead.”

He stared at me for a long time, his eyes concealed beneath the silver and white helmet so that only a slight blue glow was visible where his eyes were.

“All right,” he turned back to the team. “And that goes for all of us. Other than Blackjack, Mirage and me, you guys haven’t seen anything like what we’re about to encounter. Intel reports at least three hundred enemy supers are in the area, including Lord Mighty. We need to make our way as fast as possible to the White House. That’s priority number one. But we also need to safeguard any injured civilian we might encounter, that’s one-point-five. If any one of us goes down, so bad that Mirage can’t stabilize you, we’ll have to leave you behind. That’s just the way it is. Better you know it from right now.”

He paused and looked at his team.

“I trained you. I know what you guys are capable of. If we stay together, if we fight as one, singling out targets and assisting on them, we’ll be fine, no matter what the odds are.”

Superdynamic took a moment to make some minor adjustments to our course from his suit controls, and the ship slowed and began to drop out of the sky.

“How hot are we coming in?” I asked.

“We’re landing at an Army staging point, then taking a chopper in.”

That made no sense – it would take too long. “Why not just fly this sucker into town?”

“We’ll get made in a second,” he said.

“ETA one minute,” Ruby called out.

Superdynamic saw that his response wasn’t good enough for me. “I’m not going to fly this bird in there just to get destroyed, Blackjack. I don’t waste resources, human or otherwise. An Army chopper will be more efficient, and less likely to get spotted.”

“And less expensive,” I said.

He nodded. “I’m factoring in all variables. They’ll be used to seeing helicopters in the area; we’ll be able to slip in easier. We just need to get to their outer perimeter, and I’m not risking this bird for that.”

I chuckled, laughing at how squeamish he was about his plane. Then again, if I had designed and built it by hand, I might be protective, too.

“I was just curious,” I said, letting him off the hook.

“Okay, Moe and Blackjack will lead the way with Templar and Focus on our flanks. Inside Ruby, Mirage, and me, and Ricochet cover our tails. We move fast, and if we have to fight, we make it a rolling fight toward our objective. No hotdog crap, no heroics. We fight together. Understood?”

We all replied in the affirmative.

“Prepare for landing,” Superdynamic said as he returned to the pilot’s seat. He disengaged autopilot and took control of the stick, but not before looking back at me and flashing me a little nod of approval.





Chapter Thirty-Seven

On final approach, Superdynamic patched in to the attacking forces and moments later a pair of F-18/E’s flew out of the dense cloud cover and flanked us. An unseasonable summer storm was moving through the region, making the last few miles a bumpy ride. Once we arrived at the staging point, the two escorts sped off. Superdynamic slowed his ship, switching to V/STOL mode, and dropped out of the sky, coming below the clouds. Rain pelted the cockpit, streaming backward as we soared through the heavy conditions.

Superdynamic circled as we descended to a staging area for the forces trying to make their way into Washington, D.C. The Cicada hovered over an open field, littered with two dozen Black Hawk attack helicopters in various stages of refitting. Those ready for combat duty had lines of soldiers standing beside them as they waited their turns to board. Others were taking off and landing, and a few more were on combat patrol around the landing zone.

Around us a squall raged, whipping heavy winds and pelting rain at a makeshift city of command tents. Each soldier wore a poncho that fluttered in the heavy winds, and everything ran on ground more akin to a quagmire.

“Here we go,” Superdynamic said, bringing the plane down with help from a landing signal officer braving the foul weather to guide us. He was so skilled at the stick that we barely felt the touchdown. I only knew we had come to a full stop when I saw the others throwing off their seatbelts and heading for the midship ramp.

Wind tore at us as we debarked, making Superdynamic’s landing all the more impressive. Fat raindrops beat down with bruising intensity, drenching us instantly and thumping on the vinyl ponchos of the men that ran up to meet us. Among them was an officer, evident from the silver eagle insignia on his helm.

“Colonel Martinez,” he said, flanked by his junior aides.

He looked Hispanic through and through, with dark olive skin, jet black hair, and the unmistakable forehead and nose typical of Central American Aztec or Mayan descent. Ironically, he spoke with the strong twang of a lifelong Texas native.

Superdynamic shook his hand and followed as he led us toward the tent city.

“Thank you, Colonel,” Superdynamic said, flaring his LED screens to stop the rain from hitting his high-tech suit; the laser lights of his ablative shield danced around his body, like branches reaching out to the sky, each one forming to disperse a single droplet as dozens of others did the same. It was disconcerting to watch, but he was unaffected, and because of it, he was also the only one of us that was bone dry.

“We’ll be flying you closer on one of our Black Hawks,” the Colonel said. “We’ll get you across the Potomac to our forward command, but that’s as far as we can go. A bunch of capes are bringing down all our ordinance before we can even bring it to bear, we can’t cross the river with any aircraft.”

“What about reinforcements?” Moe asked.

“We’ve got almost a half million Army and National Guard units headed this way from as far as Alaska,” the Colonel beamed, enjoying talk of numbers. “Hell, I just got off the phone with Vice Admiral O’Keane from way out at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, who told me he’s sending everything he’s got to help. Give me forty-eight hours and I’ll have thirty divisions to cross the Potomac, and that’s just Army and National Guard.”

His confidence faded. “Problem is time. I don’t have to tell you they’re holding out by the skin on their teeth,” he said, meaning the defenders at the White House.

Colonel Martinez led us to the largest of a cluster of camo-green canvas tents. Their fabric swayed with the heavy winds and were slick with rain, but they still provided cover to the command staff. A field of tractor-sized generators powered the command center; their loud noise and billowing black smoke made me smile, reminding me of my old genie that had a hundred times the output and was only the size of your average desktop computer.

A soldier held the tent open for the Colonel and his retinue, receiving a salute from each of the officers entering. I got a funny look, as if he recognized me and wondered what I was doing with the heroes.

Inside, several low-hanging fluorescents cast a dim, impersonal light and barely provided adequate illumination to the score of soldiers working on laptops set up on folding tables around the perimeter of the tent. The middle was dominated by a trio of portable tables set side by side, on which they had taped a massive map of the capital and its environs. Atop the paper map laid a Plexiglas coverlet where officers scrawled the changes in troop formations.

I took a moment to study the map, and though I didn’t understand what unit mark meant what, it was clear that Martinez and his boys were outnumbered. General Maxwell had formed a tight perimeter around the capital, and nothing was getting in.

Except us.

“Lt. Pajit, any word?” the colonel asked of one of the group that sat beside a massive communications center.

“The general reports progress, but he’s making a request that the 11th move forward.”

Martinez took off his helm and handed it to an aide, walking over to the map.

“Have Major Lowell bring them up,” he said, pointing to a great thrusting arrow that was moving across the Potomac from Virginia using the Arlington Memorial Bridge. The river cut a wide swath from northwest to southeast splitting the district from Virginia. Three bridges spanned its murky waters in the area General Hinds had chosen to attack, which was frankly the closest approach to the White House from outside the city. According to the map, though, enemies controlled Roosevelt Island, just north of Arlington Memorial Bridge, and were blocking a friendly column on the Interstate 66 Bridge that crossed the island. South of the Arlington Memorial, on the other side of the Pentagon, enemies had also halted a flanking maneuver to Gen. Hinds’ right, blocking the bridge over Interstate 365, including the HOV span and the CSX train tracks over the Potomac.

Martinez scratched his thick black hair, releasing a sigh of frustration, as if the situation hadn’t improved since he ran out to meet us.

“The SITREP is as follows,” he began for our benefit. “General Hinds has made it across the river with friendly forces, but rearward elements of his column are getting hell from a group of mecha that are operating from the southern point of Roosevelt Island, here.” He pointed at a trio of mecha-like drawings in grease pencil.

“We can take those out,” Templar said, earning a reproving look from Superdynamic.

“That would help,” Martinez chuckled. “But ahead of the General are massed elements including a half-dozen mech, and we’re not making much progress past the Lincoln Memorial. South and north, the flanking elements are totally stalled, and we’ve just had word that General Webb, on the 66, has had to retreat and regroup from heavy fire from all over Roosevelt Island. In the south, Colonel Wargacki still can’t get a single unit across the 395 due to heavy artillery enfilade from Potomac Park and the golf course.”

“How long ago did the offensive set out?” I asked

Martinez looked down at the map, as if ignoring the question, but a strange silence spread throughout the tent.

“We took the Pentagon last night,” he said, his eyes devoid of focus. “The General set out this morning at 0800 and encountered resistance as of 0845.”

“That’s almost twelve hours,” Moe said.

The colonel nodded.

“What about the White House?” Superdynamic asked.

“We last heard from them was at 1500 hours,” the colonel replied. “That’s six hours ago, to any of you civilians. They’re not responding, so I’m afraid their comm station might’ve been knocked out.”

“The first priority is the President,” Superdynamic said.

Martinez nodded. “Agreed. Flying you in is a hell of a risk, but I found a pilot crazy enough to do it.”

“We’ll do the piloting, Colonel,” Superdynamic said. “We don’t want to risk any of your men.”

The Colonel looked at Superdynamic for almost ten seconds before answering, “I appreciate that. In any case, I don’t think you’ll be able to get across the river. Take it or leave it, but I recommend circling the zone and coming in from the north while General Hinds has their attention to the southwest. I like this spot here, but that’s just my recommendation.”

We gathered in to look at his suggestion, which was a wide grassy point north of the city labeled National Zoological Park. The area was somewhat light with enemy units, but that assumed the intelligence was accurate.

“I’d head northeast around Tyson’s Corner, then head east to Chevy Chase, and make your turn to the south there. It should be far enough away from their AA, which is massed south in our faces. Once you land, you can come down Connecticut Avenue until you face their perimeter, which begins in earnest, here, around Dupont Circle.”

He looked up at Superdynamic.

“I’m giving you an MH-60 Stealth Black Hawk, like the ones we got Osama with. It’s the only stealth unit I have. It should help with conventional forces. As far as enemy supers go, you’re on your own.”

An aide got the Colonel’s attention and they discussed a paper for a moment, giving me a chance to stroll over to Superdynamic.

“The army guys are keeping us out, while the supers besiege the White House for the President,” I said.

He nodded. “What I just don’t get is how Zundergrub is doing it, how he’s controlling so many American soldiers.” I was about to respond, but he knew where I was going. “I know some would follow Maxwell blindly, but so many thousands?”

I could only theorize. “He had control of a mob of little black implings,” I said. “He was able to retask them to do different things, maybe even use them as an extension of his mind control powers.”

Superdynamic was looking past me, at the map showing the desperate situation around the capital.

“That’s one thing we have going for us, then,” he said. “If we can stop Zundergrub, the army will be the least of our problems.”

“Yeah, but for now they’ll be waiting for us, all of them.”

I couldn’t see his eyes under his faceless helm, but I knew he was staring at me, hoping that I had an alternative.

“How fast is your suit?” I asked.

“I thought about that,” he said. “Except that anyone you or I were to carry would be exposed to high speeds, lack of oxygen, extreme pressures. Templar can teleport, but short distances.”

“Teleport?”

Superdynamic nodded.

I motioned Templar over. He and Ruby joined us in our little mini-huddle.

“How far can you teleport?” I asked.

He made sure to get a nod of approval from Superdynamic before answering.

“Maybe six hundred meters. If I push it.”

“Can you carry someone?”

Again, he looked over at his boss who motioned him to respond.

“Yes, but the distance would be shorter.”

“Two, maybe three hundred meters?”

Templar shrugged, tousling his long blond hair out of his face.

“That’s how we do it then,” I said.

Superdynamic watched me.

“We crash the White House and draw everyone’s attention to us. Then the kid gets the President out.”

Ruby smiled. “And in the meantime, we’re the bait for a bloody villain frenzy.”

“That’s right,” I went on, looking at her pretty eyes. She was scared, and with good reason – we would be outnumbered and outgunned. “All the heat’s going to be on us. But you just have to worry about the rank and file. When the big guy shows, he’s all mine.”

“Everything all right?” Moe asked Colonel Martinez, who had apparently received some bad news from the aide.

Martinez leaned over the map, his face formed into a scowl. “The General’s vehicle has been hit. He’s injured but he’s refusing to come out.”

Superdynamic moved closer to the table.

“Get us in there, Colonel, and we’ll do our best to end this.”

The Army officer looked over the map as one of his aides drew two more mecha on the southern point of Roosevelt Island and erased an icon that was supposed to be a friendly tank.

“Let’s get you to the party.”

“Thank you, Colonel,” Superdynamic said, following Martinez and his aides out of the tent and heading toward a Black Hawk helicopter that had been set aside on its own, about a hundred yards from the rest of the forces. It was unlike any helicopter I had ever seen, as if a B-2 stealth bomber had mated with a Huey. Instead of the distinctive rounded surfaces of the standard UH-60, this chopper sported angled plates on all the surfaces that looked as odd as the weirdly armored Indian Rhino. The tiles were designed to deflect or absorb radar transmissions, rendering the aircraft as invisible to radar as its stealth fighter cousins.

As we approached a Black Hawk, Colonel Martinez was forced to shout over the engine’s heavy whine and the massive whipping of winds surrounding the helicopter.

“Injured or not, General Hinds will be making a hard push. Hell, he’s just liable to get pissed and try to win the whole thing by himself,” Martinez said with a half-smile. “The good part for you is that he’ll be drawing all the attention to himself and away from you guys. That’ll give you a chance to get in undetected.”

“We’ll do our best,” Superdynamic said, as we all ducked our heads, Moe and me in particular, to avoid the spinning rotors. We started jumping in, helped up by the door gunner.

“Time to clear out, gentlemen,” Moe announced for the benefit of the chopper’s four-man crew. None of them moved an inch.

“Aren’t there other friendly supers?” I asked, and I noticed that the question caught Colonel Martinez off-guard. “I mean, are we it?”

He shrugged, “They’re mostly leaving us alone. The bad supers are just jumping on you guys, whenever anyone tries to get in. I think most of them are busy with something. There’s some sort of hubbub going on northwest of the White House, but intel’s scarce.”

“Our reports say that over a thousand villains escaped Utopia prison,” Templar said, crossing his arms.

“I believe it,” Martinez said. “It’s a madhouse in there.”

“You don’t got to go home, but you have to get the f*ck out of here,” Moe said from the front of the helicopter, shouting over the rotors at the pilot and his copilot, but he got a firm middle finger in reply from one of the door gunners.

The pilot came back to the cabin and threw a curt salute at Colonel Martinez.

“Sir, I’d like to request, on behalf of the crew, to remain aboard.”

Martinez shook his head, about to retort, but Moe beat him to it.

“Son, that’s some dangerous shit we’re about to hit. You don’t want none of that.”

Only then did I realize the pilot was also a Colonel, probably the air wing commander, and considering his age he was probably was senior to Martinez. He looked hard as nails, with a scowl that would frighten John Wayne. He didn’t like Moe questioning his toughness, especially since he was probably twenty years older than the super.

“Flying this rig into danger’s what I get paid for, kiddo,” he spoke, his face a sunburned grimace with skin pulled too tight over his skull.

“I can’t take responsibility for your lives, Colonel,” Superdynamic said, his voice laden heavy with fatigue.

“Shit,” the helo commander said. “I put five kids through college older than you. All the men on this bird are onboard and ready to go. We’re responsible for ourselves.”

One of the door gunners, unaware of the clash of wills, handed each of us a dark green poncho.

“What’s this for?” I asked the man, drawing a knowing smile.

“Leaks,” he said.

“Leaks?”

“Hydraulic fluid. Don’t wanna get it all over your nice costumes, do you?”

“I’m not getting into that thing if it’s leaking,” I said, immediately regretting sounding so squeamish in front of everyone. They just took their ponchos, throwing them on as they found a place to sit aboard our transport.

“It’s a chopper,” the door gunner said, his voice dripping with condescension. “If it leaks, then it means it’s still got hydraulic fluid. If it don’t leak, that’s when you gotta worry.”

I took the poncho and threw it on as Superdynamic and the helo commander faced off, not wanting to get in the middle of that face-off.

“We might not make it back, Colonel,” Superdynamic said, but from his posture, his lowered shoulders, I knew he had already lost the argument.

“You sure about this, Colonel Cray?” Martinez asked from the edge of the open side door.

Cray nodded. The sleeves of his BDUs were rolled up, and when he crossed his arms across his chest, he revealed a pair of corded forearms, strong enough to twist a man in two.

“Fine,” Superdynamic said, moving past Cray to take his seat.

Colonel Martinez looked us over, and I imagine he was probably bewildered that the fate of the country as a whole was left in the hands of, as Templar had said, “a couple of vets, a bunch of rookies, and a villain.” He nodded once and saluted Cray, ducking as he ran off to avoid the rotors. The co-pilot didn’t wait, firing up the engine and taking us up to the sky.

Cray didn’t hang on to anything as the chopper rose in the air and took a hard bank.

“Hang tight,” he said, returning to the cockpit. “This is going to be a hell of a ride.”

As we disappeared into the dark night, I checked my gear, popping the Bluetooth earpiece to Superdynamic’s communications system into my ear. It had a voice recognition system that interpolated the sound of your voice as it reverberated through your skull and transmitted a cleaned-up version of that sound. I had jammed the transmitter into a pocket in the back of my utility belt. I also had two each of my newly designed implosion, concussion, shock, and flash/bang grenades. Smaller than anything I had ever built, they were each the size of a C battery, and they lined the back of my belt in an organized row. I checked my new toy, a glove-mounted grapple gun with a 30-meter range. I was careful the thing wouldn’t fire inside the cabin of the Black Hawk. Looking over at Moe, I caught him smiling.

“Nervous?” he asked, and I had flashbacks to the last time I flew a military craft into a mission, sitting in a similar bay with Cool Hand, Dr. Zundergrub, Mr. Haha, and Influx, and how she had noticed my fidgeting as well. I thought of Influx’ passive-aggressive concern, her dangerous attraction. Despite her interest in me, her primary goal was the mission, and if I wasn’t up for the challenge, Influx would have dropped me out of the cabin there and then, and probably hooked up with Cool to pass the time.

I shrugged and Moe chuckled, satisfied in his need to act cooler than I. It made no sense to me, to play the tough-guy game in light of what was coming. It made him happy, though.

Down the cabin, the rest of the team was preparing for the fight in their own way. Ruby stayed close to Superdynamic, the old pro, as he chattered away on the radio, trying to find any intel that would help our hopeless mission. Ricochet played on his portable gaming system, but his eyes blared through the screen, his mind a million miles away. Moe listened to music on his ear buds, trying to put on a confident face. He was the biggest of the bunch, so the others were looking to him. Templar chatted with Focus, whose worry was evident in her pursed lips and furrowed brow. The final member of the team, Mirage, just looked out of the cabin, scratching a shoulder itch under his white robes.

“ETA thirty seconds,” Superdynamic said over our comms.

Moe waved to get my attention.

“Hey, you like Dio?”

“What?” Did he mean the musician, or Dio as in God in Italian?

“Ronny F*cking James Dio,” he said, using a head bob to accentuate each word.

I nodded and he leaned over, handing me his earbuds. Holding them to my ears, the sounds of “Last in Line” tore out of the tiny speakers.

“Too loud,” I said.

“Nah, rock that shit,” he said, motioning for me to pop the earbuds in. I did, weathering Dio’s screams and smiled as I listened to the words.

“Thought you’d like it,” he said, letting me enjoy the song, doing some light head-banging with each beat. The music was so loud, I’m sure it was reverberating out of my skull into the helicopter cabin and drowning out the chopper noise.

“Contact,” shouted a voice I didn’t recognize over our comms. Suddenly the right door gunner flinched and opened fire with the M134 vulcan gun, the report of the weapon resounding through the chopper. A rain of smoky, spent shells and links rained across the floor.

“Incoming,” he shouted, and I realized Superdynamic had patched us into the helicopter’s internal comms.

“Me too, skip,” another voice shouted, and the left gun joined in to the chorus.

I ripped off the buds and tossed them at Moe as rockets flared from the stub wings and the chin-mounted M230 ripped into the night. Inside the cabin we were illuminated by the hellfire of weaponry.

“Bank right!” Cray shouted, and the chopper dove to starboard with such ferocity we felt a moment of zero-G in the cabin, our feet and arms floating in the air. The maneuver would have sent anyone not strapped in flying out of the helicopter.

An instant after, a howling ball of plasma roared over us, just a few dozen feet from our previous course.

“Left, left!” We dove in the opposite direction, fighting the overwhelming forces of gravity that pressed against our bodies. The two door gunners were the only ones in the rear of the chopper who were unaffected by the violent maneuver, using their seat and straps as leverage to keep firing at our unseen attackers.

As we came about, I could see a long stream of flares falling behind us, illuminating a host of flying enemies with their ghostly light. The leader of the bunch was swathed in flames and rearing back, building up a fireball the size of a large watermelon and unleashing it on us.

“Port incoming,” the door gunner shouted, then the side of the helicopter exploded as a lance of bright red plasma tore into the gunner’s position. His dying scream echoed through the chopper. The pilot’s body was just a charred torso, still twitching and spattered in blood. Mirage fought off his straps, but the gunner was dead. The gun position had split apart, the weapon pylon destroyed.

I tore off my restraints and reached for Mirage, who was in danger of falling out of the helicopter with the next hard turn. His face and arm were burned, but he ignored his injuries, instead glaring out of the open door. I followed his gaze and saw a pair of supers flying nearby, actually in mid high-five, celebrating their bulls-eye of the door gunner.

“Bastards!” I yelled as Superdynamic reached Mirage and me, studying the helicopter’s structural damage.

“I’ll fly out and drop them,” he said, but I held him back motioning to something I had just noticed, another half-dozen flying supers coming to assist the two who had attacked us.

“Wish I had my bow now,” I muttered, reaching into my pocket. I came up with a handful of change and random pieces of metal from my work on my new kit.

I reared back and threw a quarter with all my might. The missile was lost in the rain and night, but when it hit, I saw one of the two supers clutch his chest and drop out of the sky. His buddy went into a violent dive to save his companion, so I missed with the next quarter I threw.

Focus was behind me, unbuckling the gunner’s remains from the melted chair and shepherding Mirage back to his seat. I looked over at Superdynamic and handed him the remaining pieces of metal and lint I had dug out of my pocket.

More flying supers were incoming now, their attention drawn to us by the deaths of their companions. They were more wary now, staying well away, until one dropped from above and bathed the Black Hawk in fire.

The pilot dove out of the billowing flames, but the fire still danced into the cabin, licking at all of us. Moe, Superdynamic, and I were unaffected. Focus closed her eyes, putting her right index finger up in the air, and the fire avoided her, but Templar, Ruby, and Ricochet were not so lucky and bore the brunt of the attack. Templar screamed in pain for a moment, but his eyes widened as Mirage stretched with his powers, spreading a blue-white illumination across the ship that protected us from the flames.

The Black Hawk itself was in flames, racked in secondary explosions above us as the fuel line to the rotary engine blew, and upon loss of power, we began to oscillate at increasing speed.

“We’re going down!” Colonel Cray yelled from the cockpit, as if we didn’t know, and the darkness rushed up to meet us.





Chapter Thirty-Eight

Superdynamic hurled himself out of the helicopter and hovered beside the crashing craft. He unleashed a light show of telemetric lasers from his suit, with a wave of his arms creating a solid-light platform beneath the vehicle that slowed our fall. I gripped the door jamb, bending the steel under my grip to keep from falling out as the thing spun. The helicopter slowed and steadied, despite the oscillating forces of the turning rotors, and descended at a safe rate.

Behind him, though, a cadre of evil supers swept in for the kill.

“Watch out!” I yelled, but he was focused on bringing the chopper down safely.

Superdynamic caught a plasma blast in the back, losing control of the helicopter. We rolled on our sides and continued falling again, but our leader raised his shields and reformed the solid-light platform, slowing our fall again. Going on the offensive, Superdynamic unleashed a furious storm of lasers and light, but the enemies were too many. For every villain who dropped out of the sky, a spray of bullets or power beam stitched Superdynamic, overwhelming his defenses and enveloping him in red, blue, and yellow energy.

“Ruby, we need you,” I shouted at our only ranged attacker, but she was pressed against the back wall of the helicopter as Superdynamic’s power waned and we once again began to fall.

“Dammit!” I raged. Surging every ounce of strength and rage into my legs, I shot out of the cabin like an arrow from my bow, aimed at the nearest of Superdynamic’s attackers.

I soared right at a woman flyer, the flamer who had burned the Black Hawk. She was channeling her powers at Superdynamic, unaware of my approach. I crashed into her, collapsing her lithe frame around my shoulder as we both fell out of the sky.

I wasn’t done. I aimed my arm and shot the gauntlet gun at the nearest villain. The six-inch-long grapple shot through the back of his cape and speared his torso. The villain screamed, ending his attack on Superdynamic, but somehow he managed to stay aloft. I engaged the magnetic winch and shot through the sky at the man. He turned, grabbing at the wound in his midsection, spinning to see what was dragging him down. He caught a glance at me and didn’t have time to look surprised before catching a right cross that almost decapitated him. Whatever power he used to keep him flying ended as he died, and I began to free-fall.

Another super in a tech suit raced down after me, raking my body with machine gun fire from a wrist-mounted cannon. Realizing I was still holding onto the dead flamer girl, I used her as a shield at first, then hurled her body at the suited villain. He was too surprised to dodge the improvised missile. Their bodies crumpled into each other in a bone-jarring, limb-severing mess.

Tumbling into vast darkness below, I felt a massive explosion somewhere near, and beneath me the world opened up, swallowing me whole.

Someone was holding me up, cursing, man-handling me as I broke the surface of a large body of water.

“Quit fighting me, goddammit,” the rough voice said, and I realized I must have fallen into the Potomac.

I pushed off from the source of the voice, paddling for myself. I looked over and saw it was Colonel Cray. He was watching me, making sure I could swim independently.

“You okay?” he asked, and I replied with a nod that I wasn’t sure he could register between the rippling water.

“Where’s everyone?” I asked, fighting a mouthful of water.

“Not sure,” Cray said, his face grim. “I got out and saw you falling out of the sky. You’re the heaviest son of a bitch I’ve ever seen.”

“What about your crew?”

The Colonel looked grave, “Part of the job, son. Come on,” he said, motioning me to follow toward the far shore, away from the White House.

“You be careful, sir,” I said, starting in the opposite direction.

“Where the hell are you going?”

“I’m not done yet,” I said, and left him there. Swimming was difficult and I noticed something wrong with my right arm, dragging me. I lifted it out of the water and saw the long metal wire taut against something dangling below the surface. I didn’t know how to disengage the wire in the damned contraption, so I just I swam to the east shore fighting the heavy pull against my arm.

I headed toward D.C. alone, having lost Superdynamic, his team, and the helicopter. Ahead of me was a wooded ridgeline over which a red glow illuminated the river with an ominous light. When I reached the bank and got out of the water, I pulled the wire and saw the dead villain was still stuck to my grapple. I pulled the guy closer and ripped the grapple spear out of his midsection, shoving his body back into the river.

I ran up the ridgeline and across an abandoned highway, cursing myself for being so out of shape that I was winded when I reached the crest. About a mile south of me, down a wooded slope, was the General Hinds’ forward position, besieged by the orchestra of rifle and cannon reports that echoed up to my position. Below me were a dozen M109A6 Paladin tanks behind the partial cover of damaged buildings, firing on Hinds and his men. Beyond that, the city was mostly dark, but I could guesstimate that the White House was somewhere ahead of me.

“SuperD,” I said into Battle’s comm system. “You guys ok?”

There was no response.

I couldn’t just stroll down to the tanks, walk right through them. Instead, I figured I’d climb around Maxwell’s forces and try to sneak past, toward the White House.

Then I laughed, remembering my rocket boots. They could have helped before, but I was so eager to try out the grapple gun that I had forgotten I could fly.

I fired up the rockets and lifted into the night, getting a better vantage point of the tank battalion below. The Paladins were firing non-stop into the offensive, causing havoc among Hinds and his men to the south. Flanking the artillery pieces were two AN/TWQ-1 Avenger air defense systems, which basically had a pair of Stinger launcher mounted on a turret on the back of a heavily modified Humvee.

Since I couldn’t contact Superdynamic and his boys, I swapped through the channels until I found the radio signal Colonel Martinez had given us to talk to General Hinds.

“General Hinds,” I said, shouting a little to hear myself over the loud thrust of my rocket boots.

“I’m one of Superdynamic’s team, trying to get a hold of General Hinds. Is there anyone out there who can–”

“We hear you, son,” a voice responded. The guy sounded like he was under heavy fire. “The general’s a little busy now.”

The Paladin artillery pieces were stopping the assault altogether, and I was in perfect position to help out.

“Tell the general that help is on the way,” I said, dropping out of the sky and landing beside one of the M109s. Several soldiers opened up on me, including a couple of gunners mounted on the command Humvees. I ignored the pelting bullets and walked up to the nearest Paladin, grabbing the tracks and turning it on its side. I didn’t want to kill the soldiers, who were just following orders, but I figured the artillery pieces couldn’t fire if they were upside down. One by one I rolled the big tanks, making them useless, and then did the same to the two AA pieces.

“Okay, tell the general those artillery pieces to his north are going to be silent for a while.”

“Give me that,” someone said, taking the microphone. “Who the hell is this?”

“I’m with Superdynamic,” I said, trying to deflect the question. “Part of his team.”

General Hinds still struggled with the headset, and I could hear the whipping of the mike against his body. “Goddammit, I said who is this? I’m not into f*cking games here.”

“Blackjack,” I said. “I’m Blackjack.”

The silence that followed belied a lengthy thought process. I could only imagine what was going through his head.

“Damn,” he muttered, making me laugh. I looked over the city, trying to find the fallen chopper.

“Blackjack,” my earpiece rang with Moe’s voice. “You up, man?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Swap back to our channels,” he said. “Let the general and his boys do their thing.”

I mentally switched channels, and Moe’s voice rang out, “Where are you man?”

“I’m airborne at the moment. What’s your location?”

“Shit!” he yelled, leaving his comm open. Wherever they were, they were under attack from heavy machine gun fire.

I flew away from the damaged tanks, over a residential area. As I rose higher, the rain obscured what little details I could discern. I tried imagining the trajectory of the crashing helicopter, but I couldn’t spot the wreckage on the ground. Instead, I saw a super circling around me, watching me as I hovered. He was flying fast, and it was hard for me to identify him, but I knew he wasn’t a hero when he fired off a salvo of rockets in my direction. I engaged the thrust and dove to the deck, but the missiles were heat-seeking and stayed close to my tail. The villain chased me. He was another guy in a tech suit, but this thing was a work of art, deadly and powerful.

I tried shaking off the rockets, but they were more agile than I, so I shut off my rockets, tucked my legs under my body, and fired the boots in the opposite direction at full throttle.

I came to a stop in a gut-churning second, and most of the rockets flew right past me. One crashed into me and exploded against my shoulder, but I paid it no mind as I powered toward the super. The maneuver caught him completely off guard, and he fired off hand repulsers to try to avoid me as I slammed into him, chest to chest, wrapping my arms around his torso. His face twisting in pain and shock behind the helmet’s clear viewscreen. Our combined rockets drove us up into the sky, high above the city and into the cloud cover, but once I had a good grip, I basically squeezed him inside his armor.

He felt the pressure at first, shouting commands to his onboard computer, but the armor crumpled in my arms. His muffled screams came to a sudden halt as his midsection collapsed under the pressure. Blood sprayed from his mouth, spattering the screen. I kept the pressure until his head lolled back and he was dead.

I released him and cut my rocket boots, the open throttle of his propulsion carrying him higher into the cloud cover, until the faint glow of his engines faded from sight.

“Moe!” I yelled, dropping out of the sky at low power, letting my body’s momentum bring me down before firing the rocket boots to give me forward propulsion.

“Yo!”

“Where are you guys?”

“We crashed in Montrose Park,” he said. Then his voice cut off for a moment despite my efforts to get him back on.

“You there?” he said after a long thirty seconds.

“Yeah.”

“Montrose Park, on R Street,” Moe yelled.

I tried remembering where the park was, thinking at first impression that it was quite farther than where I had crash-landed.

“Where is that?” I asked

“North of–” he stopped again as machine gun fire raked his position. “Son of a bitch! We’re pinned bad, man.”

“I’m coming,” I said, but I had no idea where to go.

“North of Georgetown,” Moe shouted. “Next to the cemetery.”

“I’ll find it,” I said, powering my rockets and heading north.

I couldn’t stay up in the air.

There were too many villains patrolling the skies. I even saw Hitstreak and Dr. Aeon flying around, and they were guys who could beat me by themselves.

Dr. Zundergrub had a formidable army, with plenty of fodder villains and enough heavy hitters to make it count. Combined with General Maxwell’s rebellious forces, there was more than what was necessary to take the capital and hold it against all comers. Even Superdynamic and his team.

Hiding in the cloud cover made it too easy to lose my orientation, and flying lower brought me within range of the army guys and the ground opened up with small-arms fire. I raced over a mechanized infantry unit that lit me up pretty badly. Only a sudden burst of high speed from my rocket boots let me fly past undamaged.

I was getting too much attention staying aloft, so I landed and decided to walk the rest of the way.

The new boot rockets had served me wonderfully so far, but like the previous jury-rigged rockets, I didn’t know how to land properly. I crashed into a car, flipping over it and slamming into a building that half-collapsed around me.

I dusted myself off and ran north. I figured I was close, since I was somewhere in the Georgetown neighborhood of the District. Running through deserted streets, I looked south, realizing I was heading away from the White House, away from my encounter with Lord Mighty.

Away from Apogee.

The temptation to turn around and throw myself at Lord Mighty struck me, in spite of our plan. I wanted to see how I would hold up against the man-god. Would I even stand a chance? I could fight him like I had Epic, with unleashed rage leading the way, throwing myself at him with abandon, but I knew that Mighty was a different animal altogether. Epic was probably stronger and tougher, but he was lazy and unmotivated, soft because he’d never been challenged, weak because he’d never had to try.

Mighty wouldn’t be surprised by a charge, nor overwhelmed by my anger. He could weather my blows if I landed them, avoid them with his unearthly speed if he wished. No, the only reason to face that guy was to give the team a delay. I had to stand in front of him, slug it out, and hope I could take the punishment.

But first, I had to find my team, and since my previous contact, no one was responding.

“Hurry up!” I heard someone yelling down the street. It was a woman’s voice and it sounded just like Ruby. I hurried down through an alleyway and came around the corner to a major street, Wisconsin Avenue. It was as deserted as any of the smaller roads, littered with destroyed or abandoned cars.

“Who are you?” a woman asked me, her costume a black and white spandex monstrosity, with skull knee and elbow pads and a set of tears across the abdomen, as if the material had been ripped apart by a massive claw. Her face was covered with the mask that gave the villain her name, and it only took me a second to recognize her. It was Deathshead. Beside her was Stormfire, standing with her legs splayed, arms out and ready with a reddish burning anima surrounding her fists. Stormfire’s long, blonde hair danced in the breeze, and when she turned to face me, a wicked smile crossed her face. Floating in the air in the middle of the street, watching out for incoming heroes, was Skyburner, floating in the air thanks to the jetpack strapped to the back of her mercenary armor. Once she saw me approach, her twin hand cannons trained on me, two laser sights intersecting in my chest. The fourth member of the group was Razorstrike, a sadomasochistic witch with leather-strapped armor that jutted spikes in every direction. She crouched over a fallen winged hero, who was badly injured and spattered in his own blood. A quick look told me that he was Angelus, a member of the superhero team called the Chosen. He recoiled from Razor’s slashing claws, which had criss-crossed his body with several dozen slashes. One of Angelus’ feathery wings was twisted back, the delicate bones snapped in an odd angle.

These were the Ladies of Pain, a villainess group who was among those escaped from Utopia thanks to Dr. Zundergrub, though where their leader, Bubblerella was, I couldn’t tell.

“Well, well,” Deathshead said, unraveling her Painwhip. It was an electrified weapon, and I had no idea what the effect would be when it hit my energized suit.

“Who do have we here?” Stormfire taunted, tossing her hair like if she were auditioning for a shampoo commercial.

There was no way for them to recognize who I was. To them, I was a big dude in a funny tech suit and big, ugly boots, but I knew I was in trouble if they decided to attack. Deathhead’s whip was only the first part of the pain the ladies would have in mind for me, and I was sure to join Angelus if I didn’t do something to stop them.

“I’m Blackjack,” I said, strutting forward without a care.

Deathshead gasped, Stormfire’s mouth lay agape, and Razorstrike even turned away from her sadistic torture of Angelus for one second, giving me a once-over with her cat-like slit irises.

“You dress like shit,” she said through her sharpened, fang-like teeth.

I walked right up to them, noticing how Razorstrike stood away from Angelus to join the others in encircling me.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, still putting up a strong front.

“We’re playing, baby,” Razorstrike said, licking the blood from her claws.

“Hey boss,” Stormfire shouted to one of the stores, and Bubblerella came out of small newsstand.

She was the most dangerous and leader of the bunch, with control of magnetic waves that could lay to waste a small town, but she concealed her unearthly power under the veneer of a teenage cheerleader, down to the pom-poms and everything. Bubbles was an attractive little thing with a killer figure, a blonde bob cut, and a duckface pout that she sported as she came out of the store.

“No f*cking lollypops,” she spat, not caring much about me. She turned her attention to Angelus. “Oh. My. God. F*cking kill him and be done with it, bitch. Who’s this?”

A dozen or so super villains flew above, low enough to catch wind that the Ladies of Pain were hunting and needed to be left alone, moving on for easier pickings.

“That’s right, bitches!” Bubblerella yelled them. “This is our house!”

I looked around at the destroyed buildings, the uneven streets, as if ripped from the ground by an earthquake, tossing cars and smashing windows asunder. Rubble and corpses everywhere, the place looked worse than Kosovo.

“I’m Blackjack,” I said again, and from her change of expression, I knew Bubblerella believed me.

“We should turn him in to the doctor,” Skyburner said, landing behind me.

“Good luck,” I said, angling toward at her, making sure she would be my first target if the Ladies decided to get nasty.

“Oh, shut the f*ck up,” Bubblerella told Skyburner, coming closer to me, unconcerned with the reputation or what I could potentially do to her and her friends. “You really Blackjack?” she asked, smacking her gum.

She came right up to me, close enough that I could smell her perfume, see the runs in her heavy eye shadow, and notice the nervous twitch in her eye as her thick eyelashes were interwoven with her bangs. Bubbles put her hand on my chest, rubbing my pectoral and abdominal muscles.

“Oh, my,” she whispered. “Bubbles,” Stormfire started, but she stopped with just a glare from Bubblerella.

“How tall are you?” she asked me, her attention once again entirely on my muscular frame.

I chuckled. “Big as they come.”

She didn’t like the taunt, with all of its permutations; she raised an eyebrow and half-cocked a grin around her perfectly white teeth.

“I want one,” she told the others.

“What about Zundergrub?” Razorstrike said.

“F*ck that crazy bitch. This girl wants to have fun.”

Stormfire laughed, also coming closer, “Girl, you are such a horndog. But damn, if he’s good enough for Apogee, I want sloppy seconds.”

Bubblerella liked the insult, bringing herself into my chest and angling up for a kiss. “Are you going to break my heart?”

I crossed my arms, making her take a half-step back, and said, “All of you have to leave.”

Bubbles didn’t instantly understand, trying to figure it out as sex talk, but Razor knew immediately what it meant.

“Come on, hon,” Bubblerella pleaded. “We’ve got places to go, people to kill. We could use you.”

“And abuse you,” Storm said, still playing the sexy game.

“Me, first,” Bubbles said, inching in front of Storm. “We’re tired of Zundergrub’s stupid games. He got us out, and we helped him take the town. Now I want to have some fun. I’ve been in jail for three years, Blackie. A girl needs to get laid or she’ll get ... nasty.”

There was a little sting in what she was saying, a veiled threat hidden deep within, but I could see her nerves, sense her apprehension. All those years in the mind-prison had blunted the edge.

And besides, I was Blackjack. I’m sure she had since discovered that I had taken down Epic.

“You and your freak brigade have ten seconds to f*ck off,” I said to Bubblerella.

She finally understood, as did Stormfire. I wasn’t going to be on the menu today. A fight with me meant at least half of their number dead or seriously injured. I didn’t f*ck around when it came to throwing down, something that might have spared Angelus.

“Damn, honey. It’s you who’s missing out,” Bubbles said, and then she used her magnetic wave powers to lift off and fly away. Storm and Skyburner also lifted off, and Deathshead whistled, making her Murdermachine hovering Harley appear out of the ether and roll right up to her. She jumped on, and Razorstrike jumped on behind her, making a big deal of using Deathshead’s bone-inlaid bustier to hang on. Death’s abundant bust made for an ample handhold.

“I’d heard your bitch-ass had switched sides,” Razor said. “Next time you’re going down hard.” She blew me a kiss as the Murdermachine’s engine roared to life and tore the two women away from me, leaving a heavy trail of smoke in their wake.

I ran over to Angelus, who was coughing up blood.

“Hey, you all right?”

Turning him over, it was obvious that he wasn’t. His pale skin was scarred with dozens of minor slashes, coating his upper body, shoulders and face with trails of blood, but it was a gaping wound in his lower abdomen that was the problem. It looked like shotgun blast had opened up his midsection and spilled his intestines out into his lap. The dried blood that caked his abdomen and legs gave me a hint that he had struggled with this injury for some time.

I laid him on his back as comfortably as I could. His eyes blinked, trying to ascertain who his new attacker was. He tried to push me off, but his hands were too weak.

“You’re going to be okay,” I lied.

Angelus shook, a violent wave that originated in his midsection and ran down his extremities.

“Take it easy,” I said, and not knowing what else I could do, I ran into the same store where Bubbles had come out of, looking for something to help. There were displays of magazines that were all ripped from the walls and strewn all over, a wall-length cooler filled with drinks and sandwiches, and a small counter with a register. A dead man lay doubled over the counter, his blood sprayed over the Formica. I grabbed a bottle of water from the broken-down refrigerator, running back outside.

I twisted the cap off and poured some of the liquid into his mouth, but he shook his head, pushing me off.

“It is His plan,” he whispered, a strange smile crossing his blood-spattered face.

“I’m sorry I was late,” I said, but he shook his head.

“You are in His plan, too. Blackjack.”

I sipped the water, looking down the Wisconsin Avenue in hope that Battle was nearby. Perhaps Mirage’s healing powers could bring Angelus back from the brink.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” I asked, knowing the answer.

He was so still, I thought he was already dead, but then he closed his eyes and smiled, satisfied.

“Always,” Angelus whispered, and died.





Chapter Thirty-Nine

I was lost, and not because I was a careless fool.

That was the usual reason I would be lost, a general absent-mindedness that increased as I became more concerned with the scenery than the actual goal of my trip. It had happened a million times driving around in my old Bentley, the one Atmosphero blew up along with my Malibu house. That lack of concentration was the reason I had designed my watch computer with military-grade GPS, more accurate than the commercial ones, and a 3D holo mapping feature that let me know where I was, regardless of where I was. The watch had been destroyed back on Hashima Island, when the most powerful arrowhead I’d ever designed, the Nuke, had obliterated Retcon’s device and saved the world. Haha had used it to piggyback his basic command functions. Now it was just a vestige of my old life, a memory of my foolish past.

Haha had abandoned me in Australia, but at this moment, I would have taken him back. The robot would have been worth his weight in gold right about now.

Hell, even a run-of-the-mill smartphone would have been a lifesaver. But I was a wanted felon, a fugitive of the world’s most secretive and secure prison.

Who the hell would give me a data plan?

Besides, I wasn’t lost in the usual way. I was just damned confused. Some a*shole had taken the time to pulverize every stop sign, every streetlight, and yes, every damned address sign, so I had no idea which direction R Street was. I might have been on S Street, so running one way meant a short, one-block jaunt to find the boys. Meanwhile, running the other way might send me in the wrong direction.

Another thing that was bothering me was the spandex tech suit, riding my crotch. I knew Superdynamic wanted some uniformity in his new team; he wanted everyone looking and feeling the same. I knew the logic: in the scrum of a battle, it would be easier to know where your partners were, who was in trouble, and who was coming to help. I knew that. But I didn’t think Superdynamic designed this suit for a guy my size, regardless of how stretchy the thing was. It was comfortable, and felt like you weren’t wearing anything, but now I understood why Moe wore regular pants over the thing.

I ran past a big and tall store and went inside.

To suit up.

I found a decent pair of jeans with a double-stitched inseam, and a black T-shirt. Combined with a good black leather belt and my trusty old Ass-kickers, I felt more like myself. The tech suit still protruded down to my wrists, but it didn’t look too bad.

“Superdynamic,” I said, hoping they could still hear me.

“Where are you, man?” he shot back, his voice scratchy from the shitty reception.

“I’m kind of lost,” I said, hating that I was THAT guy, the putz lost way behind. Even as I cringed at the thought of asking for help, I knew they needed me. Only I could neutralize Lord Mighty.

“No problem, man,” he said with a tone far too affable for how he had been treating me the last few days. “Your ‘twenty’ is six hundred yards northeast of us.”

“Damn,” I complained, realizing I had run past their location.

“We’re headed toward the battle lines, hoping to attack from behind and give General Hinds a reprieve. Then we’re hitting the White House. So hurry up.”

“I’m on my way,” I said, breaking into a run, heading out of the back of the store in the general direction of Superdynamic and the boys.

“You do know cardinal directions?” he asked, back to his usual smarmy self and I laughed, hating him once again.

“Yes, I’ll be there in a sec.”

“You’re northeast of us, so you have to go southwest. You got that? You’re moving northeast.”

I was about to fire off the rocket boots when something gave me pause. I couldn’t put my finger on it, just something made me stop and listen. I was standing in a wide back alley between two strip malls, each facing opposing streets, but a weird sound was coming from the other side

The honking sound of a lot of ducks.

“SuperD,” I said.

“See the Moon?” he said exasperated, his voice louder than usual as he and Battle were under heavy gunfire. “Just make a half-turn to the right–”

“No, man. I don’t need directions,” I said, kicking down the back door of a business. If there had been electricity in the district, an alarm might have gone off, but instead, I was able to enter a cake and cookie shop from the rear, passing through the kitchens toward the storefront.

“I just want to know why I can’t hear anything,” I said weaving through the dark store. “I can only hear you, is what I’m trying to say.”

I heard an audible beep, then he responded.

“There, you’re given access to all channels,” he said, but I still didn’t hear anything. In theory, Superdynamic and his team were chattering to each other, and he was monitoring all communications, including a line to General Hinds himself. But I was still in the dark.

I came to the front of the store, hiding behind the glass display.

“I still can’t–”

“You just think it, Blackjack. You think it, and the suit does the rest,” he snapped, and I remembered Apogee’s words to me back on Shard World. “He’s only a douche to bad guys.”

I almost laughed, engaging the system and being rewarded by the sounds of Moe saying “Suck-a-dick, nigga. How long we gonna wait?” I heard Templar mumbling a soft tune I couldn’t recognize and Ruby muttering, “Jesus Christ, I have to pee.” Chen said, “We can’t trust him, Superdynamic. He’s too unpredictable” over the open channel, which meant he didn’t care that I had heard. Behind it all, at a lower volume, was the channel to General Hinds and I could hear the man himself, cursing up a storm as he fought tank-to-tank through the streets of Washington, D.C. The general seemed to be making progress, now that I had cleared the artillery battalion that had pinned in down.

“Goddamn motherf*cking shoot straight” General Hinds shouted over comms. “I’ll go over there and make you do a hundred f*cking pushups right in the middle of this goddamned shit, you understand me, you f*cking cocksucker? If I had time to give you a f*cking lesson on how to shoot straight, I would. Now you’re the f*cking lead tank, act like a motherf*cking lead tank and shoot the f*ckers dead....”

And so on.

It was pretty funny to listen to him berate his troops, but I didn’t laugh. Instead, I audibly gasped, cringing under the front display of the bakery, trying not to be seen.

Ahead of me, in place of the strip mall’s massive parking lot, was a pit torn into the earth, perhaps fifty feet to the bottom and four times as wide. Down at the bottom were thirty or forty heroes, and ringing the pit were maybe ten times that number of villains acting as prison guardians. Some delighted in torturing the heroes, having found a nemesis among the throng and unleashing well-deserved revenge. Standing high over the pit were several mecha and a few companies of General Maxwell’s men intermingled with the villains. In all, there were about two hundred soldiers guarding the heroes. They took no part in the tortures and murders, but they also made no effort to stop them.

But none of that was what made me crawl under a store’s display, hiding myself from sight.

Because standing among the mecha was a tall demon dinosaur thing, a red monster I knew well and had fought back on Hashima, and at its feet, somehow distinguishable despite the hundreds of people gathered around him and the distance between us, was Dr. Zundergrub.

And he was smiling like a kid at Christmas.

“What are you doing?” Superdynamic asked as I ripped off a length of a white tablecloth and wrapped it around my face. I dug my fingers into the cotton fabric, making a pair of eye holes.

“Going undercover,” I said, heading to the wrecked door leading out.

I heard a few audio beeps, similar to when Superdynamic had opened up my suit audio. Instead of communicating with me, though, I froze.

“Is that you f*cking with me?” I asked, fighting against my restraints. The suit felt like dried paint, complaining at every effort, almost about to crack and flake off. But I was more afraid of busting the thing than I was of being held.

“Super,” I said.

“Yes.”

“What the hell are you doing?” I looked out the windows of the cake shop, hoping no one would look inside. Most were near the lip of the crater, taunting the heroes inside, but a few were bored with the festivities, close enough to the shop that it was only a matter of time until someone saw the big dude hiding inside.

“I don’t know what you’re thinking.”

“I have an idea,” I said, now as exasperated with him as he had been with me. “If it goes right, I might free a bunch of people. You see what I’m seeing, right?”

He was silent, though whether fighting off enemies or just letting me stew, I couldn’t tell.

“Right? I mean, you made the suit. It has sensors and stuff all over.”

“I see what you see,” he admitted, and from his tone, I could tell he wasn’t going to fight me very hard on this.

“There’s maybe fifty heroes down there. If I can free them, we’d have a hell of a force.”

“You’re outnumbered fifty to one. At least. You’re going to get them all killed.” He didn’t mention me, and I wondered if he was confident I would survive or just didn’t care if I died. One more loose end tied. The worst part was how much I cared what the smug bastard thought. “It’ll work,” I said. “She trusts me, Jeff. Maybe it’s time you started to.”

A couple of villains walked past, a man and woman, their hands all over each other, headed to a more private place to continue their celebration. She peered inside and caught a glimpse of me, but it didn’t make her curious, and she continued with her beau.

“You could get those people hurt,” he said, though it was clear from the tone of his voice, as it had with Colonel Cray in the chopper, that he was about to give up.

“Then again, I might save them.”

After another long pause, Superdynamic freed the suit, sparing me having to tear the thing apart. I think he knew that holding me was more a gesture than anything, but he was still concerned.

“What’s your plan?”

I walked outside the cake shop, stumbling through the crashed threshold and almost falling to my feet. One of the villains walking past caught my arm and spared me an ungainly fall. He and his six burly buddies wore simple gray jumpers and had their arms and faces laden with tattoos.

“You all right, dude?” he said, genuinely concerned, but I could tell the others were sizing me up, wondering if I had anything valuable.

“The f*ck do you care?” I growled, pushing him off. The man shrugged, walking off with his group to find easier pickings.

“The idea is to cause a distraction,” I told Superdynamic as I walked toward the edge of the pit.

Zundergrub was across the chasm, facing my direction. I couldn’t take the chance that he’d see me, so I moved slowly, using every tall person I could to hide behind, trying to blend in as best I could. I found a gap in the throng ringing the lip and peered down at the supers below.

“Are you seeing this?” I said over comms for Superdynamic’s benefit, but at the same time drew the attention of a nasty-looking villain standing next to me. He was a dark-skinned fellow with long black hair wearing typical American Indian garb – a breechcloth around his waist, leather leggings and moccasins. On his brawny torso he wore a leather beaded war shirt, dyed yellow and black.

“Of course I see,” he snapped, with an angry glare.

“I do,” Superdynamic said. “I see Coach down there, as well as FTL, Nitronic, Moonlighter and Brimstone Bobby....” he trailed off as I gave him a chance to scan.

“FTL is your buddy, right?” I said, remembering they had served on the Superb Seven together.

“Kind of,” he said. “I just ... well, the guy’s a little strange.”

I moved away from the edge, noticing that Indian villain was following me, no doubt curious as to why I was talking to myself. Ducking my head to seem smaller, I hurried through the crowd toward Zundergrub, and after a few moments I had lost the Indian.

“What I mean is, can you patch into his suit? Can you do that?”

“I could, but the signal would be easier to intercept than....”

“Than what,” I said, making steady progress toward Zundergrub. I decided to circle the pit to my right, in the general direction where the two mecha stood. His big, summoned demon was right next to them. Their massive legs and the heavy shadow they cast would provide me some cover. Zundergrub was beside the farthest mecha, surrounded by a throng of big men, almost as if he were expecting something like this. Getting to him would not only involve working my way through the crowd without him noticing me, which would be tricky even in the dimly lit night, but I would also have to fight my way through the last bunch of supers, each one bigger than I was by a factor of at least two, a few of them a thousand pounds of muscle and mass.

“Super?”

“Yeah, I’m thinking,” he said. “Okay, I’m going to patch you in directly. You’re closer, so the signal will be harder to intercept if you’re the source. FTL doesn’t have a built-in decoder like the one in our suits.”

“Fine, I’ll talk to him,” I said, not realizing Superdynamic was patching me in.

“Who is this?” FTL responded with a strangely alien accent I couldn’t place.

“FTL, is that you?” I asked, moving closer to the lip and looking for him, hoping he wouldn’t make a move to give us away. FTL’s phosphorescent armor hid his face, so no one would know what he was doing, but at the moment, he was looking around and drawing too much attention.

“Who is this?”

“I’m a friend. I’m here with Superdynamic and some others,” I said. “By the way, stop looking around so much, okay?”

“Klavess, nausca!” he exclaimed in a language that would be more at home on Shard World than here on Earth. “I need to know who this is.”

I moved away, hiding under the huge shadow cast by the first mecha. A large bonfire illuminated the area, casting a flickering light near me so I turned my back to the mecha and slowly inched around one of the massive legs.

“I can’t tell you right now,” I said, knowing I couldn’t admit I was Blackjack to a dude I had fought twice before. He was a newcomer on the super scene, so I couldn’t expect him to have heard the true story from Apogee, or to understand that things had changed, that I was on the same team now.

“That’s not good enough,” he said.

“I’m right here. Up top with all the villains. I’m moving toward Zundergrub. Do you believe me now?”

“I can’t pinpoint your location. What kind of scrambling are you using?”

I stopped beside a bunch of people near the bonfire, taking a moment to pause. Someone thrust a pitcher of beer in my hand, and I took a long swig. The cold, effervescent fluid felt like a splash of water on a hot summer day. A woman walked up to me, a villainess I couldn’t recognize, and beckoned for me to return the pitcher. I handed it to her, not realizing I had almost drunk the whole thing.

“Thanks,” I said.

“I know you, right?” she asked, with a heavy drunken slur her voice.

“I’m the White Knight,” I said, borrowing the name Dr. Retcon had used for me. “What’s your name, baby?”

She smiled, drinking the beer, and came closer.

“Hundred a f*ck, fifty a blow. You wanna party?” the villainess said, sliding into my arms. She was just attractive and trashy enough to capture my attention.

“Who is that?” FTL asked, and only then did I realize I was on open comms with him.

“Sorry, Angel. I got an appointment with the big man,” I joked to FTL, slipping out of the woman’s grasp.

“Faggot,” she said.

“Not sure who that was,” I told FTL. “I’m under the first mecha, I said. I’m about to come to the lip, dude in a black shirt and a white blanket on my head. Kinda hard to miss.”

I inched over, walking past a group of people sitting around a hookah, and came as close to the edge of the pit as I dared. I didn’t look down; in fact, I kept my attention on the folks in the hookah circle, apologizing as I carefully walked over them.

“I see you,” he said.

“Okay, here’s the plan. I’m going to walk up to Zundergrub and throw him down to you. You catch his ass and hold him hostage until he releases the others.”

“I don’t like your plan.”

I laughed. “I bet you don’t.”

“It’s an incredibly nearsighted plan. There are too many villains and soldiers around, what’s to stop them from killing you?”

Moving past the circle, I walked in a direction away from the pit, away from Zundergrub in the hopes to come around the second mecha, from behind the doctor. He was about twenty feet from the farthest leg of the second mecha. A hollow feeling settling in the pit of my stomach and a pang at the back of my throat as I neared him, knowing that if I could get close enough to him, this fight might be over in the time it would take me to throw him down to FTL.

“It will work,” I said in a vain attempt to sound confident. Zundergrub was surrounded by a cadre of supers, the two mecha, and his red demon monster. FTL had every reason to doubt I was going to get close.

“Perhaps.”

I looked up at the eighty-foot mecha. “Have a little faith.”

I wiped the sweat from my brow as I approached the nearest leg. The robotic creation was standing beside another large bonfire where some villains played music while others danced. From the smell of marijuana, I could tell most of this group of villains was having a good time. Most of them wouldn’t notice my assault on Zundergrub until it was too late.

I slipped past a nuzzling couple, pondering the dichotomy of the college-like parties surrounding a concentration camp reminiscent of the Third Reich.

Ironically enough, the area right behind where Zundergrub stood was rather sparse. Near him was the defensive throng, and farther away were twenty or so villains at the campfire, two small groups of villains, and one group of a half-dozen soldiers. But there was a dead zone between Zundergrub and the rest, probably because someone had parked a pair of mecha so close.

I swallowed hard, knowing that the plan might be stupid, but maybe it was simple enough to work.

“Spread the word down there,” I said, hoping he was still listening. “Make sure Coach, Nitronic, and Brimstone Bobby are on the ball,” I said, mentioning the three most powerful supers Superdynamic had identified. Coach in particular could turn the tide with her mind control powers. It made no sense that she was captive. Nitronic had phasing speed powers and could devastate the mecha by himself, and Brimstone Bobby, while a bit unpredictable, could level ten villains with every one of his lava blasts.

“Okay, give me a moment,” he said, and I casually strolled across the legs. I was close enough and the crowd here was sparse enough that I had to move slowly, pretending as if I had to take a leak to make the distance between the mecha’s huge legs. I was behind the nearer leg of the closest mecha to the doctor. The only thing that stood between me and Zundergrub was his personal guard. A group of villains moved into the shadow of the red demon, including anthropomorphic fox and badger supers who were tormenting a young hero I couldn’t identify. The sad fellow had his hands tied behind his back, reeling in pain as the furry villains stabbed at his arms and legs with their claws. I felt like going over there and smashing furry heads together, helping the kid out, but I would make a commotion too close to Zundergrub. I’d get caught in a second.

“Stranger, are you still there?” FTL came back.

“I’m here,” I said, making sure to talk softly enough that no one could hear me.

“We’re ready,” he said. “Coach has a few of the villains under her control already, so be careful with your distraction.”

Someone grabbed me from behind and ripped my makeshift mask off. I turned to see the American Indian villain standing there, a tomahawk in hand.

“I knew it,” he said, rearing back the weapon, his attack drawing the attention of the fox and badger villains.

I didn’t hesitate, dodging the attack by dipping my body left and letting the blow swing past. I countered with a left hook that caught him under the chin. I was careful to check my strength, fearful that my blow would decapitate him, but the Indian was a tough bastard, big and strong. He spun with the force of my punch, slamming the tomahawk against the side of my face.

I clenched my teeth from the painful blow and reached forward, grabbing the bead straps on his arm and slamming my face into his. His face exploded in blood, the blow knocking him unconscious in my grasp. I let him slip to the floor, but the damage was done. I’d been spotted. The stocky badger snarled at me, moving in my direction, with his fox buddy in tow. If Zundergrub’s defensive retinue heard the commotion, I was done for.

I hurried, turning my back on the badger and peering around the edge of the mecha leg, hoping that no one had noticed. One of his goons was looking in the general direction of the ruckus, but hadn’t warned the others. This was my chance. I made my move, walking right at him.

I could hear the badger behind me, growling, shuffling, coming closer, as I walked to the first of Zundergrub’s guards. He was Asian, with the wide shoulders and rotund frame of a sumo wrestler and the matching Chonmage hairstyle. He didn’t recognize me, which was a blessing; he came at me with the false belief that he could stop me alone.

“You can’t be here,” sumo guy said.

“You make sure you catch him,” I said to FTL.

“Make sure your throw is accurate,” he replied.

The goon grumbled something in Japanese, with a low, guttural growl, and as a response, I slammed my two fingers, Three Stooges-style, right into his eyes, grabbing his mouth to muffle the painful groan. I then dug my knee into his bountiful stomach and threw him behind me at the badger villain. The anthropomorphic man-creature dodged the sumo wrestler with ease, but it did delay him long enough for me to turn on the next goon.

There were ten or twelve left, spread out so I only had a couple of them directly between me and Zundergrub. Another one felt the commotion and turned, but he was off to the side so I ignored him, moving to the next guy, a seven-footer with broad shoulders. I drove my foot into the back of his right knee and grabbed his face, spinning him backward. Again his scream was somewhat muffled, but he was so close to the others that they were warned.

Everyone turned on me.

I shoved the groaning man into the next nearest defender, toppling both. Ahead of me a huge guy readied a punch, but someone else tagged me from behind, shoving me into him. I grabbed his shoulders and hurled him aside, making a small gap appear, just enough for me to squeeze through.

“Here I go,” I said, pushing through, despite ripping threads of my T-shirt as someone else tried to restrain me.

I shoved against the last two goons, pushing both aside and standing right behind Zundergrub. I could see FTL below, looking up and ready for my move. All I had to do was grab the old man and throw him down there.

It was all ready, the plan had worked, we were going to win. With the doctor in the pit, FTL would have enough to make most villains surrender, and with my distraction, they could turn a leaderless flock of villains into a routed horde.

Racing closer to the doctor, I felt time slow, like the reverse of a Cool Hand bubble, and felt the heavy pounding of my heart resounding against my ribcage. Behind me was mass of humanity grasping and clawing at me. I had no time to waste; in moments I’d be restrained and the plan would be shot to hell.

I made it to the doctor and was looking at the back of his bald head, close enough that I discern the spattering of liver spots, a sprinkle of dandruff flecks. Close enough to feel an onslaught of memories flood forth from the back of my mind. I saw fleeting images of Cool Hand’s last moments, Apogee blood-soaked, near death, Dr. Walsh’s chest exploding outward and her father’s madness almost ending the world. As the flashback washed over me, I felt a broiling conflagration well inside me. I clenched my teeth, straining against their roots and brought my arms around his neck, putting him in a headlock. Zundergrub gasped, unable to breathe, and his fingers clawed at my arms. Without another word, I did what I had to do.

I broke his neck.





Chapter Forty

He twitched twice, and was limp.

I turned him around, hoping that he would see me in his last fading moments, that he would know who had killed him. I wanted to see an expression of shock and disgust, hoping he would see the satisfaction on my face, but his eyes were already losing their sheen, his mouth was agape and drooling.

He was gone.

It didn’t matter if he knew. Zundergrub would go to the afterlife ignorant that I was his killer, that I had travelled across the whole world, from the pits of hell itself, to find and kill him. It didn’t matter anymore. He was dead, once and for all, and nothing else mattered.

“Zundergrub is dead!” I yelled, lifting his body in the air and hurling him at FTL below. Someone grabbed me from behind, but a rearward elbow sent the person reeling. I expected more resistance, a wave of bodies to wash over me, as his guard exacted their revenge, but other than the one guy, no one attacked me. Instead, an ill silence spread across the place.

“He’s dead!” I yelled, a teary ebullience overtaking me, forcing my voice an octave too high. “Zundergrub is dead!”

I shot a glance behind me, at the guard, and saw a few of them rushing at me, fighting to get through most of the others, who just stared at me in confusion. Most others just glared at me, stupefied and glassy-eyed from as far as the other edge of the pit, wondering where they were and what they were doing.

Then it hit me: some of these villains were Zundergrub’s thralls, victims of his mind-control powers. In my estimation, half the villains were under his control. The rest were genuine followers, too crazy or stupid to know that Zundergrub meant to end the world, or too foolish to care.

The willing participants were bereft of a leader, and had a target for their growing anger and frustration.

Me.

Before I could take my next breath, they swarmed me. Hands clutched and tore at my clothing, fingers stabbed at my face. In the fraction of a second I had, I scanned the edge of the pit and saw the shocked faces of everyone who wasn’t too high or drunk to notice. I had killed their leader, decapitated the snake, but the fight was only beginning. FTL, to his credit, caught Zundergrub and pretended to hold him hostage, as he and the rest of the heroes struck hard. Nitronic, as I had expected, took to the air and rammed into one of the mecha, toppling the thing onto a host of villains. Those who could scattered, but many were caught under the thousand-ton behemoth. Coach was also ready, firing a dozen visible silver threads from her cranium at the villains she had managed to take over before I killed Zundergrub. These puppets turned on their friends, making things even more confusing. Brimstone Bob also sprung to action, firing off lava-borne volcanic rocks at the biggest congregations of villains. Others jumped or flew out of the pit, ready for action, including Doppler, Carbide, and Silverstone, who charged me.

I saw them coming, but there was nothing I could do as a wave of flesh overtook me, toppling me to the ground. It reminded me of Hashima Island, at the very end, when I had broken the walls down and surrendered to the heroes. These were the believers, the inner core of Zundergrub’s army. Through the crowd, I saw Doppler hover toward us and fire his convection waves at the whole bunch, compressing time and space, and pulling all of us toward him. A few villains fell into the pit, unable to combat Doppler’s attractive powers, only to be surrounded by non-flyer heroes and pounded to a pulp. Carbide charged in, unaffected by Doppler’s power, slashing at us with his diamond-hardened karate chops. He kicked me in the face, knocking me back with surprising strength, and moved toward the next target, at ease in the role of skirmisher, striking at everyone at once. Silverstone rose in the air like Doppler, spreading her arms wide and unleashing a hailstorm of crystalline jagged shards that tore into the host of enemies. We were caught in the midst of two competing forces, between Doppler’s power tugging us toward the pit, and Silverstone’s pressing storm, ripping at flesh and clothing, pushing us away. The combination was a gut-wrenching push and pull, and more than one villain emptied their stomachs, clawing at the pavement or each other to fight the effect, screaming in agony as the torturers had the tables turned on them.

The second mecha stitched the area around us with a fusillade of small rockets, a thousand tiny explosions tearing into our horrible reality. Doppler saw it coming and threw a defensive shield around himself and Silverstone, but Carbide, along with several of the villains around me, caught the brunt of the blasts.

Freed of the hero’s effect, I rushed the mecha, jumping over the corpses of villains who only moments ago had been crushing me underfoot. I also ran past Carbide, his body torn to pieces. The mecha pilots saw me and fired an auto-cannon, but I was beneath it before it could track my position. One of its huge legs rose, bending at the knee, the foot large enough to cast me into darkness, but that was just what I wanted. I caught the downward stomp, feeling the force of the blow push me down and cracking a deep pit into the pavement. I lifted upward against straining servos and motors, spinning the leg at an odd angle, forcing the whole mecha to lose its balance.

I tried man-handling the thing onto the largest clump of villains possible, but by now most were scrambling, avoiding the fight altogether or running for their lives. Only the crazies were fighting. The mecha was too heavy for me to maneuver, and as it swung around with its hip pivot grinding metal on metal, the momentum carried it onto the other fallen mecha. It crashed to the ground in an ear-jarring symphony of mangled metal, causing a minor earthquake and raising a cloud of dust and debris.

I looked around for another target, but most of Zundergrub’s heavy guard were dead or pinned, as Silverstone’s power worked through Doppler’s shield. They stayed close to each other, the perfect combination of offense and defense, the shield able to deflect every bullet or missile shot in their direction while Silverstone’s hail crippled or suppressed all but the toughest foes.

Unfortunately, I was one of the few standing people in their near vicinity, and she made sure that her pelting rocks and shards caught me. My skin was tough enough to withstand the assault, but I cringed at the raw ferocity.

The last of Zundergrub’s guards, a guy so big he dwarfed me, was unaffected by the crystal hail. He grabbed me from behind and threw me. I flew through the air, slamming into the leg of one of the fallen mecha, spinning twice in the air and crashing against an overturned vehicle.

The goon jumped the distance, landing next to me and helping me up, rearing back for a bone-crunching haymaker. I tried to dodge, but the shot caught me in the right shoulder, slamming me back into the crumpled car. I swung out, using the momentum that pushed me forward after the impact to strengthen my blow, but the big guy was a good fighter. He slipped left of my right cross and punched me in the temple so hard I almost faded out. In that moment’s confusion, he picked me up, much like I had Zundergrub a moment before, and threw me into the wreckage of the two mecha. I slammed into the heavy armor, leaving a deep indentation, but the momentum swung me over the wreckage and back almost to the same spot where I had killed the doctor.

I started to get up, but Silverstone saw me and dropped a jagged hailstorm on me, forcing me to protect my face. The big guy jumped atop the mecha’s midsection and saw his advantage. He swung his arms out, readying another jump that would bring his whole weight down on me.

Then I noticed a silver thread trailing from the back of his head. He was one of Coach’s puppets.

“Wait!” I said, but the goon jumped anyway. I rolled away, barely missing the stomp, and came to my feet.

“Coach, it’s me....” I said, trailing off, not knowing how to identify myself. To tell her I was Blackjack would earn me no favors.

The goon moved forward, ripping off the remnants of his shirt and jacket and clenching his fists tight, walking through Silverstone’s hailstorm without a care.

“I’m the guy that was helping FTL!” I said, backpedaling away, but I ran into something, and before I could turn around, I realized I was in a full nelson lock.

It was the Indian villain, and he was strong enough to hold me. Nothing I could do would ever break his hold on me.

“Kill him,” my captor told the goon. The Indian was fighting my efforts to get free and holding me up at the same time to give the goon a sweet target to get a good blow in.

The goon came forward and paused, though his face was utterly expressionless. He looked at me, then the Indian.

“He killed Zundergrub, take his f*cking head off,” the Indian said.

The big guy reared back, putting everything into the blow. I couldn’t get out of the lock despite my massive strength, nor could I twist in any way to avert the incoming shot. I just closed my eyes and clenched my teeth, and hoped I’d get a chance to return the favor.

The blow landed, knocking me and the Indian back a dozen feet. Our bodies were like rag dolls, flopping about before crumpling to the ground. I stood, expecting to feel the stinging pain of the punch, but instead I looked over and saw the Indian’s face caved in.

The goon was still devoid of expression, but as I came to my feet, I saw a few heroes closing in, landing around me, forming a circle.

Nitronic was there, as were Silverstone and Doppler, and soon most of the remaining heroes approached me. I saw Coach standing behind FTL, her silver threads trailing off in every direction, including the goon that had dropped the Indian and a few other villains ringing her like Zundergrub’s guardian posse. She was a tall, thin woman, maybe in her mid-fifties, with short blonde hair ringing a severe face. Her blue eyes regarded me as one would a trapped pest.

“You should have run,” she said.

I laughed. “If that’s what passes for ‘thanks’ these days, well ... then you’re welcome.”

“Careful, he’s dangerous,” said Nitronic, and I didn’t know whether to be humbled or ashamed. They circled around me, adding to Coach’s mind control army to give me no chance at escape.

Chaos raged around us as heroes exacted revenge on their captors. Some, like a flamer called Pyromancer, scorched his enemies to a crisp, spreading his burning flames without care for friend or foe. In his defense, he had been one of the poor souls enduring torture when I had made my move. Others, like Defiant, found their lifelong nemesis (in his case, Maggot) and resumed their quarrels. A few heroes, like FTL and Technometer, used their ranged powers to scare the throng of villains away.

For their part, few villains stood and fought. Psychlok grew to huge proportions, transforming into a thirty-foot-tall man-lizard with mottled blue skin and a red slashing pattern on his back. His skin was near invulnerable, but alone the heroes were slowly overwhelming him. Satanica was another who didn’t fear any of us. She swung her Deathlash about, throwing curses and using her lifeater aura to rip the soul from anyone who got too close. A couple of heroes had dared, and their lifeless bodies lay at her feet, nothing more than denuded bone and dust.

This bunch of heroes was only concerned with me. They had caught Blackjack, and they weren’t letting me get away.

“I’m who you have to thank for being free,” I said, standing more upright than I felt, after the pounding I had received.

“We can take him between all of us,” Siverstone said, getting ready to attack.

“No, you can’t,” I smiled.

“Easy, buddy,” Coach said, making sure a few of her toughest puppets were between us. “Look around you. It’s over. Your boss is dead, and the rest of your buddies are captured ... or dead. Just turn yourself in and we’ll figure this out.”

A huge boulder flew overhead, making us all duck. Psychlok was giving them a hell of a fight, using churned-up pieces of concrete as missiles against FTL and other fliers.

“I’m here with Superdynamic,” I said, hoping he’d be listening, hoping he’d have my back, but the son of a bitch let me go down in flames. This way, I wouldn’t interfere with his plan for the White House. This way I was neutralized and he could be a hero, without me to worry about.

I thought of my boots, and didn’t figure anyone here who could catch me. FTL and Technometer were fast fliers, but their attention was on the huge monster, Psychlok. I could be halfway to New York City by the time they realized I was gone. The problem was Coach – she would mind-control me the instant my boots came alive.

I could attack her first, drop her before she got a hold of me, but there were others to contend with. Doppler could hold and keep me still if he got me early enough. Nitronic was a flier, but I had never seen him go that fast. I could probably outrun him, but I couldn’t out-distance his powerblasts and I couldn’t risk a lucky shot destroying my boots.

Still, there was an easy way out. I could get away, fly back to Superdynamic and rub it in his face. Thanks for the help, a*shole. But something kept me from running. Maybe it was the thought of always running. I was probably just an obstinate bastard who didn’t know better, because, facing off against an overpowering group of heroes, I just laughed, inviting the fight.

“You people are so goddamned stupid,” I spat, my voice growing louder and louder. “I just saved you. I killed that piece of shit, the one that’s behind all of this, and now you want to fight me? Huh? Because of something that happened a year ago?”

Coach raised her hand, stilling me. Perhaps because of her age, because she was known as a serious hero, I quieted.

“Blackjack,” she began. “I don’t know much about you, but I do know that you escaped captivity along with everyone else here. I also know that you were put away for some serious stuff.”

“Then why help you? If I’m one of Zundergrub’s boys, then why kill him? Besides, there’s no time for this. Superdynamic and his team are headed toward the White House; they’re trying to free the President. They need your help, dammit!”

“Maybe you turned on him,” Nitronic said, slightly adjusting his ready pose. “Look, it’s easy. Surrender or we pummel you.”

I laughed again, “Take more than you guys to bring me down.”

“We’d take you easy,” Doppler said.

“Then why are you waiting?”

Coach shook her head. “Enough of this crap,” she said. A silver lash whipped the distance between us with such speed that I was barely able to flinch.

Memories flashed by my consciousness, like she was flipping through the card catalog of my life, one instance at a time. She was there at every important moment. When Atmosphero showed in the middle of the armed robbery I tried to stop, my first heroic effort gone wrong, Coach was one of the bystanders, watching as the hero stitched me with lightning from head to toe, only to drop to one of my trick arrows. When Influx, Cool Hand Luke, Mr. Haha 2000, Zundergrub, and I had crossed weapons, pantomiming the knights of the round table, Coach’s visage replaced that of a figure in one of the paintings. When Gentleman Shivvers slit Influx’ throat, Coach’s face reflected behind a blood-spattered mirror. When I sacrificed myself for the others, for Apogee, on Shard World, climbing the rocky outcropping and firing off my remaining arrows at the incoming Mist Army horde, Coach’s features were concealed by the helm of one of the onrushing Pig-gorilla warriors. When Zundergrub betrayed us at Hashima, when he mind-controlled Sharpshooter, commanding him to fire his weapon at Dr. Retcon’s daughter, Coach was there, her face reflected in the rifle’s scope, her cold expression softened, becoming almost tender as she watched Retcon grieve, then descend into madness. And as Zundergrub fought me, toying with me as Apogee bled to death, as Retcon used the machine he’d intended as Earth’s salvation to murder every living soul on it, Coach was a gleam in Retcon’s insane eye, staring at me from within the vortex of Telluric energy, watching as I fought for the woman I loved and a world that would come to despise me.

When she released me, only a split-second had passed, but in that time, she had seen my full experience and knew me better than anyone. She was gentle in her probing, but despite that, I felt dizzy and physically ill. I doubled over, fighting the urge to free my stomach.

“Easy there,” she said, reaching out to hold my arm when I stumbled forward. “Yeah, that can be kind of a rough trip.”

“Coach?” Nitronic asked, not sure what she was doing.

“He’s all right,” she said, though I wasn’t sure if she was referring to my character or just commenting on my reaction to her powers.

“Wish you had warned me,” I said, but Coach just laughed.

“What do we do with this guy?” Silverstone said, inching closer, ready to throw her powers at me once again.

I tried to stand as straight as I could, to be as imposing as I could, in case one of these guys got the funny idea to take me down while I was under Coach’s spell, but she just stood in front of me, her arms on my shoulders as if about to embrace me.

“You okay?” she asked, squeezing my deltoids.

“Yeah, I think so.”

Coach chuckled. “Hell of a thing.”

I smiled.

“Can you stop Mighty?”

“I think so,” I said, suddenly remembering where I was, what I was supposed to do.

“Then go,” she said. “We’ll clean this up and help that General fellow the best we can.”

She released me, stepping back to join her heroes. Her mind puppets ran off to join the fight against the remaining villains, leaving her undefended.

“Let him go,” Coach said as I was about to engage the rocket boots.

I gave her a curt nod as I lifted off, her voice fighting against the roaring of my boot thrusters. “He’s on our side,” I heard her say before she turned her attention to the remaining villains.

I took to the air, keeping low and slow, though the thrusters left an easy trail of smoke to follow in my wake. Superdynamic was still silent on comms, and I couldn’t reach anyone else from the team. I guess he had decided to close me out.

Instead, I tried to draw a straight line in my head from the rendezvous site where the chopper had crashed to the White House and tried to match that vector on a parallel, hoping to find Battle. I flew at treetop level over a street of demolished brownstones and saw several fallen supers that drew my interest. A few hundred yards away, a few tanks opened fire into some wrecked buildings, and I could see a horde of army guys shooting at anything that moved.

Landing, I saw the South Korean villain team K-POP, their dozen or so members strewn about the area with various injuries.

They were a posh bunch, dressed in successively more ridiculous costumes, blue velvet fabric, sequin and rhinestones. The heavy of the group, BIGBANG, was split in half, as if cleaved by a huge blade. The wounds were cauterized, which made me think of Templar’s grand cleaver. Most of them were seriously injured, including one fellow I couldn’t recognize whose body had burst outward like an overripe melon. Their leader, D.i.s.c.o., was sitting atop a large rock, holding a wad of his torn clothing against a wound on the side of his head. Another of their conscious members, former JV pop star Hyula, raised her hand at me, charging her palm with raw energy. She was dazed and bruised, but she wasn’t going to go down without a fight. Seeing her about to attack me, D.i.s.c.o. lowered the rag, curious to see what was going to happen.

I lifted a chunk of building, a concrete baseball weighing perhaps a quarter ton, and made ready to throw it. Hyula dropped her hand, covering her face as she began to cry. D.i.s.c.o. held the cloth back to stem the bleeding on the side of his head and sighed, resigned to his fate. I tossed the rock aside and ran toward the heavy gunfire.

Ahead was Superdynamic’s group, taking cover in the wreckage of nearby buildings. They were surrounded by a full company of army regulars, including a Bradley M2 and two Humvees, raking their position with high-caliber fire and TOW missiles. Moe was in front of the rest, giving the army guys a clear target away from the team, but he looked weary, exhausted. The others huddled deep in a nook, at least one of them injured.

Superdynamic had warned us: these were just rank and file soldiers, following orders, however deranged they might be. We needed to measure our response against them, but they were killing my team. I landed behind the Bradley, drawing fire from a few nearby soldiers, their AR-15s pelting me like heavy rain, but I ignored them and lifted the IFV from behind and hefted it into the park. One of the .50-caliber gunners on a Hummer turned his attention toward me, but I fired the grapple gun into one of the heavy wheels, the solid metal spike penetrating the thick armor with ease, and gripping the corded metal line, swung the rope in a wide circle around me, the Hummer’s tire’s rending concrete and earth as it skidded, lifting off the ground with the force, and flying in the same direction as the first Hummer as I let go. They collided in an explosion that blossomed high above the gutted buildings lining the street.

I ripped back at the grapple, tearing a wheel off the Humvee lying upside down in a charred wreck. A press of the winch recoil button sent the bouncing tire back to me, and I now had a makeshift shield. The soldiers in the area pulled back, peppering me with fire as I ran toward the fallen helicopter.

As I came around the corner to their defensive position, Moe’s fist flew at me much too fast for a guy his size, and with equal speed he pulled up when he saw me. He held both arms up defensively, blowing out a deep breath. I clapped his shoulder, trying to be friendly, and he nodded somberly. Mirage was working on Ricochet’s chest, weaving the flesh and bone back into place with his miraculous powers as the boy squirmed in Focus’ arms.

“They just started shooting, man,” Moe mumbled.

“Where’s Superdynamic?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Something hit him before we crashed.”

“Damn.”

A shot rang out, slamming into my back and stinging like hell. I turned and saw a trio soldiers running around our flank covered by a guy with a SAW who opened up on me. Moe ducked back under cover, but I strolled toward him, using the Humvee’s thick rubber to protect me. I grabbed a massive piece of concrete debris and hurled it with an echoing roar toward the trio, a cloud of red mist the only trace they ever existed, the concrete’s momentum carrying it through two buildings before the sounds of its crashing ended.

The SAW guy’s mouth dropped agape, but he yelled something and let his weapon rip, so I ripped the tire off the grapple and threw it at his position with similar results.

“We have to move,” I said, walking back to the team. ”They’re just going to radio our position in and overwhelm us.”

Moe nodded. “What about the little guy, man.”

Ricochet, in his pain, looked over at me, fear settling over his eyes.

“We have to leave him.”

“I won’t leave him,” Mirage said, still hard at work.

I looked down the street, noticing half a dozen soldiers crossing about a hundred yards away, and beyond them another tank rolling at us.

“Remember the plan,” I said.

“You’re not in charge, damn you!” Mirage spat. “We don’t follow your orders.”

I didn’t have time to respond as something landed next to me, chucking me to the ground before I realized it was a villain. Moe didn’t hesitate, adding a “bitch” to the full body right cross that sent the super flying half a block into and through a nearby building.

I came to my feet, noticing a few more hovering above us.

“That’s the way,” I said, and let Moe help me up.

“We can’t stay here, Chen,” he told Mirage.

“I need five more minutes,” Chen said.

Templar drew his ridiculously huge glowing sword and stepped forward, ignoring a few scrapes and cuts that required Mirage’s attention.

“I’ll hold them back,” he said, his voice cold and severe.

“That’s crazy,” I said. “There’s a bunch of supers up there.”

“We’re close, though,” said Moe. “Must be less than a mile if we hump it.”

“Focus, you and Ruby stay with Chen and Rico,” I said, figuring Moe, Templar and I were the real remaining heavy hitters on the team. We could at least try to make it to the White House. “Okay, let’s go,” I said, running off into the street.

The instant we left cover the soldiers opened up on us. Bullets bounced off my skin, and Templar spun his massive blade creating a protective shield. Moe had a different response to the incoming fire, he just took it, and the bullets seemed to get sucked into his body after slamming into his heavy skin. At the same time, and so subtly I almost missed it, he grew proportionally to the mass he was inheriting.

Templar fired a bolt of crackling energy from his weapon that had a mind of its own, twisting around corners, making sharp turns, bouncing off one, then another soldier, dropping them in fits of agony as violent electrical charges worked through their bodies.

“They won’t be harmed seriously,” he said, noticing the incredulous look on my face.

Freed from the barrage, we broke into a jog and took an alleyway around the incoming tanks. We followed Moe, who seemed to have a better grasp of the city. Just as we cleared the street, the tanks opened fire, blowing the area behind us to smithereens, raising a cloud of smashed brick and debris.

We came out the other side of the dark alley to see Superdynamic doing battle with more than two dozen super-powered enemies.





Chapter Forty-One

We didn’t hesitate, wading into Superdynamic’s light show as solid light and lasers flared out of his suit, circling around his torso and arms, wrapping around one of his attackers, the energy flaring bright, spikes shooting from the cocoon in loose ventral currents. Raw screams registered in my ears just as the flaring light stopped, the villain hanging in mid-air for a moment before hitting the ground in a boneless heap.

I ran up to the biggest guy, slamming my heavy boot into his knee, blowing out the joint. I followed up by grabbing his belt and lifting him off the ground just as a heavy thudding came to a stop behind me. I turned to see an eighty-foot tall mecha stop and bring its weapons to bear on me.

I threw the super at the mecha just as a half-dozen missiles fired off at me. The super caught some of the attack before slamming into the mecha’s chest, but the world around me exploded into fire as the mecha unleashed its full fury, opening up with more rockets and a dozen shoulder-mounted mini guns.

“Blackjack,” I heard someone scream above the hum of machine gun fire and the roar of explosions tearing up the ground, spitting up asphalt, dirt and rock. After what seemed like an eternity, the fusillade ended abruptly. Looking up, I saw Moe using one of the mecha’s arms as a battering ram against its torso. Superdynamic was lashing out near and close with his beam energies, holding the machine in place, peeling its armor back with dozens of lasers. Templar dove into the air, carried aloft by the magical eddies of his sword, impaling the mecha with a single thrust through the chest, the sword hilt digging deep into the armored monster. The robot tank erupted in an explosion that sent Templar flying back, but he just spun gracefully in the air and landed on his feet with the skill of a gymnast.

The remaining supers retreated, staying close enough to remain a threat. Moe ran over, helping me to my feet.

“You all right?” asked Superdynamic, brushing the dirt from my head and face.

“That was some shit,” Moe said of the punishment I took.

“Only hurts when I laugh,” I said, in a vain attempt to lighten the moment.

“Mirage, you online?” Superdynamic called into the comm system. “Dammit, I couldn’t reach General Hinds,” he said to us before Mirage interrupted.

“I hear you loud and clear. We’re on our feet, moving southeast down some back alleyways.”

“Sending you our telemetry, Chen. You remember how to use the tracker?”

“I’ll get us to you,” Focus said. “We’re two blocks north of you.”

“Okay, we’re waiting for you,” Superdynamic said, then turned to me. “You sure you’re all right?”

I nodded, still shaking out the cobwebs.

“Those MAV-1’s are motherf*ckers,” Moe said, referring to the military designation for the mecha we had just fought.

Moe drew into his coat and pulled out a thin flask.

“Here, take a shot of this. It’ll warm your balls.”

I took a swig of what turned out to be whisky.

“Good stuff,” I said and took another drag. “Sorry about splitting up back there.”

Superdynamic smiled. “You saved my life.”

“Where did you say General Hinds is?” Templar jumped in, ever to the point.

“About a mile that way,” Superdynamic said, pointing toward the southwest. “They’re not making any progress. General Maxwell’s forces have circumvallated the White House, and they’ve formed a fortified contravallation around the city against Hinds and anyone who might stop them.”

“Like I know what the f*ck that means,” Moe grumbled.

“What it means, my dear friend, is that we have to try to help General Hinds get through. Last I heard on radio chatter, their column of tanks is headed up 14 Street across the bridge. They’re in sight of the Washington Monument but facing off against a few of those things,” he motioned to the fallen mech.

“Hell, they’re almost through,” I said, thinking back to my limited knowledge of the capital. The monument was just south of the White House on the National Mall, due east of the Reflecting Pool, between the Lincoln memorial and the Capitol. But we were north, with the White House between us and General Hinds’ offensive.

Superdynamic patched us into the comm and we could hear some of the chatter.

“We’re closer to the White House,” I said. “Might as well go there first.”

Behind us, about a mile back, a tank turned the corner. The commander stuck out the top hatch, and when he saw us, he yelled down to his crew. The tank wheeled toward us, leading a column of M-1 Abrams tanks.

“That was the plan,” Superdynamic said, “But now it’s not looking feasible.”

“Why’s that?” I said.

“Lord Mighty is keeping the skies clear around the White House.”

“That’s a motherf*cker,” Moe grumbled, echoing what we were all thinking as we looked up and saw a figure hovering over the White House, like a lone sentinel, watching all approaches.



I’d stood next to Lord Mighty, felt the imperious grace with which he carried himself, and I dreaded the next few moments. We were less than a mile from the White House and through the alleys we could see the ruins. But to get there we’d have to sneak past the man who could easily bear the title of greatest hero alive.

Except he wasn’t a hero anymore.

Whatever madness had overtaken him, induced by Zundergrub or not, he had changed sides and now stood against us, an impassable obstacle.

He floated a few hundred feet in the air above the wreckage of the White House, angled away from us, lording over the city and, by extension, the world, letting us all know what would come of his wrath should he choose to impose it upon us.

A strange silence surrounded the area around the White House ruins. None of Hinds’ troops had made it this far, and we had already passed through the outer ring of General Maxwell’s circumvallation. A few super villains flew above, but none dared come any closer, proof that Mighty wasn’t allowing anything near the White House.

“Everyone ready?” I asked, my eyes never leaving the floating figure.

“Templar, port in,” Superdynamic said, motioning to the younger man. “See what’s left in there.”

Templar held his sword tight and closed his eyes, saying a silent prayer before summoning a vortex of whirling magic that carried him away from us.

I expected Mighty to catch wind of this, to notice and flash into the White House to stop Templar’s magical transportation, but he did nothing.

Superdynamic motioned to me. “You can do it.”

He was scared. This wasn’t a bunch of psychotic villains, sub-powered and chaotic, like the ones we had faced and beaten so far. Mighty was the most powerful force left on earth, and if I couldn’t stop him, then no one could.

“I got him,” I said, knowing it was a one-way trip, conjuring up the courage that Nostromo had showed on Hashima when he had hurled himself against the Lightbringer.

He nodded, squeezing my arm, and then looked back at the horde of villains that were following us.

“I gotta admit,” he said, low enough so only I could hear. “I wasn’t sure I could trust you.”

“You thought I was going to pal up with Zundergrub?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“I did what I had to do,” I said, meaning murdering the doctor.

Superdynamic stared at me for a long time, trying to find the right words, before deciding to let the moment pass and looking back at the pack of villains behind us.

I followed his gaze; there were at least a hundred of them within a block of us, staying back in large part because of Mighty, but also because we had put a hurting on them. They figured that once we got closer, the big guy would come down and show us a thing or two, and then they could pile on. I wondered why they still fought, with Zundergrub dead. Maybe they didn’t know and still hoped to curry his favor. Maybe they thought they could still collect on my bounty. They sat back, watching from the street, atop rooftops, or from the air.

“We see what the kid says when he comes back,” I said, also speaking low enough so only Superdynamic could hear. “If the President is still alive, you guys go in there, find her and Templar ports her out as far as he can, then try to make it to General Hinds and his boys. The rest of us and whatever’s left in there, we make a final stand and try to make it look good.”

Superdynamic nodded.

“It’s all contingent on you getting his attention,” he said, pointing to Lord Mighty.

I smiled. “I have a way with people.”

He cracked a grin too, but I could sense his tension. We were the last line of defense. If we failed, it was over. Hinds and his boys couldn’t fight off all those villains by themselves, and with us gone, little would stop Zundergrub’s horde from taking the White House, regardless of what Lord Mighty did. If the President was taken, or killed, the damage would be done. The world would fall to chaos.

It was up to us.

Templar’s magical field popped, bringing him back to us.

“So?” Superdynamic asked, the anxiety evident in his voice.

“I talked to the President. She said–”

“Is Apogee there?” I said, taking Templar by his arm with a sudden force that surprised the others. Moe was about to intercede, but he just put his head down.

“Yeah, she’s there, man,” Templar said, anger laced through his tone. I let go and he took a step back, keeping a wary eye on me. “The Revolution is down to her, Damage, and Dominus. The rest are dead. They’ve got a couple of other supers, and maybe thirty kids with rifles.”

“Jesus!” Moe said, shaking his head.

“Apogee’s tried getting the President out a couple of times, but Lord Mighty’s stopped her, even against all of Revolution.”

“Mt. Fuji’s dead?” I asked, wondering about Revolution’s resident tough guy, a big Sumo wrestler guy who could turn to stone and was thought to be tougher than anyone. Apparently, not tough enough to stand against Lord Mighty, as Templar confirmed.

“Yeah, he’s dead, Bamma’s dead. Jasper and Snaps.”

“Damn,” Moe said, doubling over and leaning on his knees, bewildered at the butcher’s bill. I didn’t want to tell him that the day was still young. More of us were going to join the list of fallen before it was all done and through.

“You tell Apogee the plan?” Superdynamic said.

Templar looked at us, evidently trying to find the right words. “She doesn’t like it, Super. But she’ll go along. Most I can port in a jump is a half a kilometer or so. Most times I’ve ever ported is three in a row, but that was by myself.”

“You have to get the President out,” Superdynamic said. “Port her southeast toward Hinds and his people by the bridge. Hopefully Mighty’s too busy to track you once you port.”

“What about the rest of us?” Moe said.

Superdynamic pointed back at the horde of villains.

“If they attack, that’s our job. We join up with Apogee and her people and fight as best we can. They’re a bunch of damned cowards, so drop a few of the bigger names and the rest will scatter.”

He looked over at Ruby, Focus, and Mirage, who were running out of an alley to join us, and clapped Moe on the shoulder. “Chen will make all the difference. With his help, we’ll get in, trust me. Once we’re inside, he’ll be able to keep us up, and with his illusions we’ll have the upper hand. I’ve identified 127 of the 138 villains that are nearby. None of them are formidable enough to defeat us if we work together. You okay, Rico?”

Ricochet chuckled, “My suit’s acting funny, Dee.” He winked at me. “It’s too fast for me to react in time. But I’m cool.”

“I know this is a lot to ask,” Superdynamic went on, “but we’re all that’s left. Get inside and we’ll be fine. Apogee has Damage and Dominus, and you know those two guys are big time. The key is Mirage, though. Ricochet, you, Focus, and Ruby watch his back, keep everything off him. Moe, you and I are backup on Lord Mighty.”

“God in heaven,” Moe said, his face blanched at the prospect of facing the man-god.

“Yeah, I hope he’s listening, too. We need his help now more than ever. If Mighty gets past Blackjack, we’re the last line of defense.”

He looked at us once more, settling again on Templar.

“Templar, you get to the President and port her out, get her out of this place. Don’t worry about anything else, you understand?”

Templar nodded, his face stern, concealing all signs of fear or nerves. The others might have been worried or even panicked, but they were ready, even if it meant they would die in the next few minutes. Rookies or not, Superdynamic’s team were good people.

“Everyone ready?” asked Superdynamic, placing a flat hand in midair at waist level; Chen placed his atop, and one by one the rest did as well. Despite the direness of the situation, my mind flashed back to Influx, Cool Hand, Haha, and Zundergrub standing just like this, the image fresh from Coach’s probing, and I couldn’t help but wonder at being the only member of that team still alive. Superdynamic looked at me, his mouth quirked to the side in the barest hint of a smile, and I couldn’t help but smile a bit on the inside as I placed my hand atop the pile.

“Hell of a thing,” I said.

“Good luck, everyone. Let’s go!”

As we ran out of the alleyway, the others turned away from the White House, and I was the only one running the right way. Already our plan was going wrong. Where the hell were they going?

“Wrong way, dammit!” I said, frustrated, but Mirage just shook his head and waved his arm in my direction; then I saw what was happening. The real Superdynamic and his team appeared, running in front of me. The folks running the opposite direction, headed toward the villains, were an illusion, courtesy of Mirage. But he had excluded me from the illusion, still thinking of me as the bad guy.

“Come on,” Superdynamic shouted, noticing me lagging behind as we ran across Pennsylvania Avenue. “Now, Blackjack!” he called, and I fired my rocket boots, lifting me in the air straight at the most powerful force on the planet.

I had a better mastery over my refitted boots than the original ones, and this pair had better, more refined control surfaces. I rose toward Mighty and hovered a few feet from him. Instead of a straight-up fight, which I knew I couldn’t win, I was going to try to talk to him.

“Mighty,” I said, but he didn’t turn to face me.

“Getting my attention so your friends can enter unopposed,” he said hovering at an angle to me, his eyes steady on the White House area. “That is the best plan you could manage?”

“What happened to you?” I said, noticing he looked different and not just the longer hair that he still had slicked back, and the new beard. He was older, with his face streaked with lines, his hair marred by gray. “Why are you doing this?”

“What do you care, Blackjack?”

“Zundergrub’s turned you, man. You don’t realize it, but he’s done something to you, he’s f*cked with your mind.”

He ignored me, continuing with his previous line of thought.

“If your beloved were not in danger, would you even be here? What if I gave you my word she would not be harmed, permanently? Would you then go?”

I struggled with the boots for a second, making a mental note to build a hover setting to the toe controls if I managed to live another day.

“It’s not about her,” I said.

“Oh? You think you can lie and I can’t tell? How about this, stay and fight and I promise you I will kill her.”

“Zundergrub is mind controlling you. Don’t you see?” I pleaded. “You don’t have to do this. You have a choice.”

He finally turned to me, his face breaking into a horrible grin, “You think he has me under his spell, do you? You think I am in his thrall?”

I just stared at him, dumbfounded.

“I have chosen to be here, Blackjack. I came here because I am tired of these petty people, ungrateful for what we have done for them all these years. They don’t deserve the lives they waste. I could level every city on the planet in an instant, but Zundergrub has a better plan. A more efficient plan. Let them destroy each other. It might take longer, but it will be that much the better if they do it to themselves. So much more fitting.”

It couldn’t be. He had gone mad.

Mighty looked down. “They are almost inside,” he said. “Run, little children, while you can.”

“Mighty, don’t do this,” I said. He wasn’t listening to me. A whale doesn’t take note of the krill’s concern before swallowing it whole.

“Templar gets to the President and ports her out,” he went on. “And you’ll have failed in stopping me.”

I knew he was about to fly off, and with his unparalleled speed he’d leave me far behind. All he had to do was find Templar and bring him down, and all our hopes of winning today’s fight would be dashed. I couldn’t let that happen.

Lord Mighty actually looked surprised when I powered my boots and grabbed him by the midsection, pulling him away from the scene. We broke Mach 1, then 2, exploding through the sound barrier, leaving behind a cone-shaped cloud of mist. I carried him farther from Templar and the others and the city fell far below us, yet he did nothing.

“You think you can stop me?” he said, grabbing my head with both of his hands and peeling me away from him. I slowed the rockets, expecting a blow, but he just smiled, and in an instant, he broke my grasp and was gone, all the way to the White House before I could even blink.

“No!”

I swung around and threw the throttle on full, roaring back to the capital.





Chapter Forty-Two

Nearing the White House lawn, I saw Mighty standing in the mid of a crater he had made while landing, holding Templar by the neck. They were amid the wreckage of the West Wing and the West Colonnade, which connected the administrative side of the White House to the Executive Residence. This building somehow still stood, surrounded by a series of potholes, most inhabited by kids in Virginia Military Institute uniforms, wielding rifles.

The others were scattered, thrown about by Mighty’s thunderous entrance. Only Moe opposed him, grasping at the newcomer and cursing at him through clenched teeth. Mighty was faster, and a swift backfist sent Moe flying into the ruins of the West Wing. Moe’s attack did manage one thing, as Mighty had released the unconscious Templar. Keeping the throttle open, I slammed into Mighty, digging my shoulder into his back, burying us both into the ground with an impact so brutal that it cratered the ground and churned thousands of tons of dirt, rock, and debris high into the air.

The ground still shook as I pushed off him, coming to my feet first amid a cloud of shattered earth. Mighty wasn’t expecting the blow, but he was already regaining his senses and I knew I had little time. I looked around desperately, finding Templar lying nearby, his eyes closed and I hoped the kid was just passed out and not dead. I grabbed my teammate and flew out of the depression in the ground. Above, it was chaos. Lord Mighty and I had made a thirty-foot-deep pit that destroyed part of the White House defenses. To either side were continuations of the trenches of wrecked building and dirt where some of the VMI kids hid, firing away at the horde of villains who had figured out they were being fooled and now charged into the fray.

A flyer went over me, spreading his blue flame energy over the area, but a volley of .223mm bullets caught him in the chest and he dropped out of the sky. Another villain wearing heavy armor raked the kids’ defensive positions with auto-cannon fire from his shoulder-mounted weapon. A dominatrix-inspired villainess cracked her whip at Ricochet and Ruby, but by the fact that her aim was terrible, I could tell that Mirage was nearby and his illusions were fooling her. Further down the hill, a big villain – Tauros, I think he was called – was facing off against Apogee, Superdynamic, and Damage, but the minotaur villain shrugged off Apogee’s blows and Superdynamic’s solid light projections. Damage reached out with his devastating gravity powers, freezing Tauros in place, but a pair of ninja-dressed villains dropped from the damaged second floor and attacked him. One almost stabbed Damage but stopped mid-swing, stepping back from the hero. The two ninja then turned like automatons and charged Tauros. Concealed behind a half-standing marble pillar was the final remaining member of Apogee’s Revolution, Dominus, his outstretched hand the only sign that he had taken control of the villains.

Carrying Templar, I ran behind the dominatrix villain and kicked her away. She crashed into a wall, the sound of her bones and skin slapping against the hard concrete making me cringe as much as her death shriek.

“Where’s Mirage?” I asked, approaching Ricochet and Ruby.

“Here,” a voice said, and I felt an invisible force take Templar from me. Mirage was still playing games with me, staying invisible. I was an enemy as far as he was concerned. “Get him up and get him to the President.”

“I know what to do,” Mirage snapped, enveloping Templar’s unconscious form into his illusion. Ricochet and Ruby retreated toward the damaged building, the only clue to where Mirage was.

I looked over at Tauros, who held the lifeless body of one of the ninja, using it as a club against the second ninja who was hanging on his back and stabbing him with a sword. I fired up the rockets and landed beside Tauros, just a few feet from Apogee. Her face was aghast.

“Fancy meeting you here,” I said as I slugged the minotaur in the chest with all my strength. The monster lifted off the ground, flying backward down the hill and coming to a heavy landing against the outer gates.

“Dale,” she said, as a villain powered past me and slammed her down. He was like a cannonball, his whole body encased in flames. I didn’t know who he was, but the villain wrestled her down, and the flames were hurting her. Before I could take one step, Damage turned on the guy, using his powers on the flamer. An instant later, he weighed nothing, like a feather in the wind, and Apogee power-punched him in the face, sending him reeling into the sky.

“Nice trick,” I said, but Damage next turned his power on me. Instead of making me light like he had on Apogee’s attacker, he reversed the ability, making me weigh so much I couldn’t keep on my feet. I collapsed, feeling the blood in my brain heavy, as if it was liquid concrete flowing through my veins.

“I’m on your side, dude,” I managed.

“Let go of him, Damage,” Apogee said and he obeyed, freeing me from his power.

She helped me to my feet, and I let her man-handle me, feeling the thrill of being so close to her.

“He’s a friend,” she said, but before I could say anything, I saw Mighty float from the hole. He scanned the area, bypassing us in favor of Ricochet and Ruby.

I fired my rockets and charged him, but Mighty flicked a flat hand out, like swatting a fly, and caught me just above the temple. My momentum shifted downward, and the thrust of the rockets drove me into the ground, cratering another section of the lawn. Dazed, I didn’t disengage the rockets, angling them downward and shooting out of the hole, then pulling back enough to hover just above it.

“You can’t stop me,” he said, his voice dripping with disgust. Apogee screamed my name and charged, but he caught her punch and squeezed her hand in his, breaking it. She cried out and threw a blow with her left, which he also caught.

I flew at him, grabbing him in a headlock.

“Let go of her!”

Squeezing my massive arms around his neck was useless and he did nothing to stop me, knowing that I couldn’t exert enough pressure to threaten his airflow.

I released my lock, grabbed a handful of his slick black hair with my left hand, and threw punch after punch at the back of his head, but he just weathered the blows. I was hurting him, but not enough to turn his attention away from Apogee. He was about to break her other hand, only seconds away, and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop him. I was like a child trying to bring down a grown man. In a straight-up fight, he would win every time. It wasn’t a contest. I had no chance.

Well, then I wasn’t going to fight straight.

I reached over and bit his ear off.

He shrieked, recoiling, and with just a shrug, sent me reeling back into the ground. Fortunately, he also released Apogee. She fell to her knees, cradling her injured right hand.

All around us, villains were rushing in, but with a wide sweep of his hands and a few volleys from the VMI kids, Damage held them off. Ruby’s sonic powers held another pair of villains aloft, and Ricochet had a villain in a full nelson while Focus punched him repeatedly. A powered armor villain had landed and was blowing his full ammo load at a barricade of VMI kids, when Moe came up behind him and ripped his armor apart. Dominus’ last remaining ninja pawn slashed at any villains that neared Ruby and Ricochet. Behind one of the pillars stood the President herself, flanked by a pair of cadets, opening up with an M16 into a nasty ram-headed villain who was charging her.

I picked up a piece of shattered concrete, weighing maybe two or three tons, and hurled it with all my might at the half-animal villain, taking him out like a pin against a bowling ball. The President looked over at me and I winked.

I then turned my attention to Lord Mighty, who held onto his bloodied ear, wincing in pain. I grinned, knowing there was one thing I could do to get his attention: humiliate him. I also knew my place in all of this. I had to keep him away as long as I could.

“Hey, a*shole,” I said, spitting out the piece of his bloody ear in his face.

“You dare....” he said.

I smiled, flashing my bloodied teeth.

His eyes bored into me, unsure how to respond. “Kill,” he said, a deranged look mangling his features.

I looked over at Apogee and saw her eyes filled with tears. Whether she cried at the pain of her broken hand, or because she knew what I was going to do, I didn’t know. I just winked and fired my rocket boots, racing off.

Lord Mighty was on me in an instant, not even two hundred feet off the ground, grabbing at my leg. I kicked his face, sending him reeling, but he was on me again before I could blink. He grabbed my leg, spun, and hurled me.

With my newly modified boots I could fly at several thousand miles per hour, close to Mach 3, but it paled in comparison to the speed that his throw carried me. I turned and twisted, trying to get my feet in front of me to use the boots to slow me down, but a figure raced past me in the direction I was headed.

It was Mighty.

I didn’t feel the next blow, blacking out as a white light exploded near my forehead, but when I came to, I was flying in the opposite direction at roughly the same speed. As my senses came to, I crashed into a building, slamming through walls, masonry, and floors and coming out the other side. I flopped into the street, crushing an overturned concrete truck and finally coming to a rest.

As I rose to my feet, still woozy and not yet fully focused, he hit me again, and again I raced through the air. This time I felt the punch, like the blow of a hundred sledgehammers against my jaw. Tasting my own blood, I smashed through a tall building, crashing up through one floor, then another, my momentum carrying me to the point that I just burst through the other side, flying across the space between it and the next structure. I smacked into that building too, breaking through several walls and coming to a rest after bouncing down an elevator shaft.

I lay on my back a moment, feeling the world about to fade, when Mighty appeared above me, looking down.

“Pathetic,” he said, picking me up and punching me out of the building.

This blow was clearly harder than the others, because I passed out, waking only when my body came to rest against the wall of a ruined building somewhere in Georgetown. My neck was constricted, tightened, and every muscle in my shoulders was complaining. I rolled to my feet, trying to look around, but my head wouldn’t turn, and blood was pouring out of my broken nose.

Ahead of me, a gas station erupted in fire and I figured I had crashed through the mini-mart into several of the pumps before shattering the brownstone I stood in.

I felt a whoosh of air and swung, half expecting him to be in front of me, but just as he’d done with Apogee, Mighty caught my fist mid-blow.

He smiled, I suppose in part satisfied by how much he was hurting me. And I was glad for it. Instead of interrupting Mirage from bringing back Templar, instead of ruining our plan, Mighty was channeling his rage at me, giving my friends time to save the day.

“You’re a coward,” I said, spitting a chunky wad of blood into his face. He recoiled, horrified at my gesture, and crushed my hand before punching me away. I screamed as every bone in my fist was instantly turned to powder, the pain dwarfing anything crashing through a line of cars might have caused. Coming to a stop, I held onto my broken right hand.

“Motherf*cker!”

He was right there, picking me up off the ground, and I barely saw his arm cock back before his fist connected with my face with the dull crack of bone. The blow launched me into the air, this time straight up. Again, I blacked out a moment from the ferocity of the punch, coming back to as I soared through the air. My momentum faded and I started falling. I shook my head, trying to clear it, but all I saw was a blur and then I felt another powerful punch take me back up into the clouds. I was flying, but not because of anything I was doing.

Again, my upward motion slowed and I came back down, and again he hit me, this time in the chest, sending me flying high in the air. It was like getting body-slammed by a battleship, and I felt several ribs snap. Doubling over to hold my broken chest, my aerodynamic characteristics went to hell and I started flipping over and over.

Something made me flinch my toe throttle. Maybe it was the fear of imminent death.

I knew he was playing with me, unleashing his rage, but when he realized I had fooled him, when he knew I had drawn him away from the President and given my friends a chance at victory, he would be enraged beyond his capacity for restraint. He would just pop my head off and try to find Templar.

I had no guarantee that Mirage had brought him out of unconsciousness. I had to keep Mighty going.

One thing I had noticed, and I don’t know how this managed to break through the barrage of blows and resonate in my conscious, was that Mighty repeated himself. If something worked for him, he kept doing it.

Looking down, I saw him approaching for a punch, but firing my rockets had upset his plans. Mighty scanned the air for me and raced in my direction once he found me.

I swung and actually caught him, but my hand erupted in pain and I screamed in agony. I had used my broken right hand. I held it against my chest, feeling the tears stream down my face as I fell out of the sky. What my blow had done to him, I didn’t know. The ground raced up toward me, so I turned my feet toward the ground and fired the rockets, slowing my fall to just a minor crash. I landed on a UPS truck, coming to a rest inside the back. My landing was so devastating to the truck that every tire blew, and the roll-up back door flew upward. I tried to move, but every joint complained. My left leg was broken below the knee, maybe both bones, and my right femur was cracked. Breathing was a chore with snapped ribs, and my left ulna jutted out of a tear in my forearm. My right hand was broken, even worse than the first time I had hurt it. I couldn’t see out of my left eye, and it felt like the whole orbital bone had collapsed when I touched the swollen area gingerly.

Slithering on the ground, I snaked down the caved-in back of the truck across the bumper and down to the pavement.

The ground thundered in front of me, bouncing me in the air. I landed, every painful break complaining, and looked up at Mighty standing over me.

“How are you doing this?” he roared.

My vision was blurred, and I only had one good eye, but I could see his hair frazzled, his body coated in sweat, his breathing heavy. He was tiring.

But he could take his time, not wear himself out. I wasn’t fighting back, was I?

I threw a punch but he avoided it easily, coming closer and punching me across the street into a wall. Before, he had rushed me, hitting me before I could react, but this time, he just strolled in my direction, his breathing labored again. I picked up a chunk of fallen concrete and hurled it, but he ducked under it and he punched me again, a backfist that sent me back into the wall.

“How are you doing this?” he demanded again, firing a flurry of blows that rocked my face and chest. He stepped back and let me slide to the ground.

“You should be dead, damn you!”

He reached down and grabbed my arm, holding it up in front of him.

“What is this?” he said, ripping back the long sleeve of the tech suit, but it took me a long time to focus with my one good eye. He was holding up the arm with Claire’s bracelet. The thin leather bands that held the metal discs had somehow survived the punishment, and now glowed. In fact, as he studied it, he began to notice a green pearlescent anima surrounding me. I remembered Claire taking a bit of my life force to keep her going, and I could feel the same happening now, the bracelet draining his life force to keep me alive.

I looked at his face, now closer than we had been the whole fight. I didn’t see an omnipotent demigod, I saw a tired old man, face lined with exhaustion, posing a false bravado of lost strength. I didn’t know how much of that could be the result of Claire’s bracelet and how much was just old Father Time showing on Mighty, after he’d exerted himself like he never had before.

He reached for the bracelet with his free hand and crushed it, along with the bones in my arms. I screamed in pain, losing what little strength I had. He pushed me down and straightened, towering over me so all I could see was the bit of light coming through between his legs.

His legs.

I threw a punch at his balls. He recoiled in defense but I half-caught him, doubling him over. The pain was mutual, as I had used my damaged right fist. His face was so close to me that I drew back, standing with my right leg, and powered all my strength into a left cross that caught him across the nose. I purposely made it a shallow punch, to catch the bridge of his nose, rather than the cheek. I felt it snap under my knuckles as my blow threw him across the street and through the nearby wall.

A jolt of fire ripped through my broken left forearm, but knowing I had caught him, knowing I had the strength to hurt him tempered the pain tearing through my arm.

He rose above the crumbled building, rubble and dust falling off him as he flew to me slowly. Mighty wiped the blood from his nose; it was just a small spot, a minor break.

Yet I couldn’t move, couldn’t stand. I was beaten and he knew it.

A noise drew our attention down the street and we both turned. A tall mecha, bigger than anything we had seen, was moving about a quarter mile down the road, trading fire with an unseen enemy. I could hear a whisper in my ears, like a distant song, a smattering of yelling that I could barely discern.

“That is the sound of your General Hinds,” Mighty said, wiping his nose and leaving a smear of blood. “His last few men are making a final, brave stand, but I’m afraid they will soon fall. And when I’m done with you, I will return to the White House and finish off your friends. Except for the beauty. I haven’t had a woman so comely in some time. I will tonight, though. I will have her and choke her to death as I finish inside her.”

The buzzing in my ear made me reach for it with my mangled hands, and I felt the earpiece dangling from the cable near my ear. I instinctively pressed it in and could hear General Hind’s voice in the back of my head.

“If there’s anyone out there,” the General said. “Anyone at all, we could sure use your help right about now.” His voice cut out, and I heard an explosion in scuttled stereo through the earpiece and my natural hearing simultaneously, but he fought to get through despite the loudness. “We’re under heavy fire … if anyone can hear me.” It sounded as if he was running.

“But I’m not done with you yet,” Mighty said as he landed next to me and grabbed my neck with both hands. He meant to choke me to death. “And now we have no magical accouterments to save you.”

I reached for his face with my hand, and he shook me away, but I finally got my left hand into his mouth and held it so I could reach over with the shattered fingers from my right hand.

He bit down, laughing as I screamed in pain, but he didn’t feel me close my grip around his jaw, bring my knees up into his chest, and heave with all my might. I cried, yelled, and squealed, pulling his jaw toward me, pressing his chest away at the same time, using all my strength against him. He realized my position of leverage far too late to use his overwhelming power. Mighty panicked, biting harder and taking a bit of my right pinky off.

I was so awash in rage that even the pain of a removed finger was nothing, the rubbing of bones in my left forearm a minor annoyance. Nor was the complaining of my smashed femur going to slow me down. My scream became a roar, and my world turned white with rage. He might be Mighty, but I was Blackjack, goddammit! If I was going to die today, the whole world would know, Lord Mighty would know, that I had died on my feet.

I felt the flesh tearing, heard the pop of bone and tendon, the give as muscle sheared, and his jaw ripped free of his skull. I flew off him, slamming into the ground.

At that moment, every shred of pain returned, every break sang through my body like the chorus in a requiem mass, reminding me of how ruined my body was. I almost faded, almost fell to the darkness that was dancing at the edges of my vision, but something in my hands was amiss. Had he bitten through all my fingers? Had he taken my hand as a whole? I looked down at the bloody mess in my hands, and saw Mighty’s lower jaw.

The man himself was on his knees, finally laid low and gasping as blood poured down his gaping maw. The skin had torn down to his neck, leaving raw flesh exposed. He gasped at me, overcome by pain, almost pleading with his eyes since he could no longer talk. His tongue lolled limply over the new gap in his face, the muscles controlling its motion hanging in useless strips from my hand. His chest and arms were soaked in crimson, and at his knees lay a pool of fresh blood.

I summoned up my remaining strength and managed to stand, the blinding pain from my left femur not enough to slake my anger.

Because the job wasn’t done.

He pawed at me as I came closer, shoving me back with a bloodstained hand, but his strength was sapped, his will gone, knowing that if he lived, he would be disfigured, no longer the princely wonder he had been.

I grabbed his hair with my left hand, raising him off the ground, and he clawed at my chest, ripping my shirt,

“Gah,” he said, speaking to me, perhaps begging for mercy. But I had none. There was nothing but cold death in my heart. “Aaaah!” he yelled, spattering blood at me as I reared back and stabbed him in the neck with the jagged bone of his own mandible. The bone pierced the exposed flesh, and more blood fountained out his damaged neck and mouth. He pushed me away, reaching for the jutting bone, but it was a childlike gesture, devoid of any power.

“Motherf*cker!” I yelled, summoning up the strength to rear back my good leg, kicking down into his neck and jamming the bone deeper as his life ebbed away.

I dropped to my knees, laughing in satisfaction, watching his breathing slow, then still.

Lord Mighty was dead.

I inched forward so I could look into his face, his jaw-less form still and his eyes gazing off into nothingness. Every ounce of me cried out for help, for Mirage to heal me, but I knew I was miles away from the White House, and I doubted Chen would lift a finger to help me. Every broken bone sang with a vengeance and I could feel cracked ribs piercing my lungs, biting at my breath. My hands shook, caked in blood, my legs were twisted and useless.

Ahead of me, the ground shook. The mecha shook off a pair of RPG shots and fired off a stream of hot lead at General Hinds’ position. If we were close to the General, that meant we were near the Potomac, somewhere to my right, and Hinds had made it across the river. But the mecha, almost eighty feet tall, had taken them by storm, destroying their offensive.

“If anyone can read me,” Hinds pleaded, the sound of machine gun rounds almost drowning out his screams. “That fellow Blackjack that was flying about a minute ago, we could sure use you, son. Your country could use you.”

I fired my rockets.

The throttle was in my left foot, which was broken, so I pressed down hard despite the agonizing pain. I picked up speed as I streaked toward the mecha, aiming for the midsection joint. It was a circular ball and socket joint that was almost ten feet in diameter and corded with layers of heavy armor. The world blurred past, and I struck hard, then saw white.

And the world faded.





Chapter Forty-Three

I heard the voice twice, once close, and again far, but I didn’t understand it. I couldn’t breathe, and that was all that mattered. Something lay atop me, smothering me, and I couldn’t catch a breath of air.

Maybe this was hell?

The Hell of Always Choking to Death.

I pushed, but it hurt.

Better to choke

I rested, waiting for....

No, dammit! Move it!

I moved, shifting, but the voice complained. Closer, then far.

Can’t breathe!

I panicked, pushed; the pain wasn’t worth choking for.

Something moved.

“Get it off him!”

Was that me talking?

No, it was close, inside me, then far. “Come on, son! Help us out!”

I don’t use “son” with anyone.

I pushed again, something shifted aside, and light flashed across my face.

Hell of Things Shifting, then Light?

“Sweet Jesus in Heaven!” said a blurry figure that stood over me. It was a barrel-chested man with a severe face. My eyes blinked, or rather, my right eye did. My left eye felt like someone had laid a mound of concrete on that side of my face.

“Get a medic!” the man said, and I immediately recognized him as General Hinds. The voice in my ear was the voice coming out of his mouth. It was him. I had found him.

“I know you,” I said, but my jaw wasn’t working. I looked around, hoping it hadn’t fallen off completely. Or if it had, that someone could find it, let me have it. If I was going to lose my jaw, I wanted to at least keep it around.

But reaching up I touched my jaw. It tingled with pain, broken.

Good, like everything else.

Hinds got on his knees; it was him and a white blur.

Was he God?

“You stick with me, son. You hear? You stay with me, dammit!”

I shook my head.

“I’m okay,” I said but it was a blurb of vowels.

“You don’t quit on me, you understand? I don’t give you f*cking permission to quit on me, soldier!”

My hand found his chest, and I finally saw it. My fingers were all broken, splayed and bloody like a grenade had exploded in my hand.

“Tell Apogee,” I said, gasping between words, and I was expecting the final darkness to close in. I had done it; I had saved the day again. Whatever came after, I didn’t care. It would be fine by me. This was how I was going to go down and it didn’t matter, nothing mattered, except that someone would tell her, that someone would let her know that she had made a difference. I had done it for me, but I had done it because of her. She had saved me; someone had to tell her.

“Apogee?”

I nodded, aware that I had little left, maybe one final whisper.

“Tell her I love her,” I gasped.

Hinds turned away from me. “Give them our location,” he yelled as the shadows that surrounded him faded in, slowly giving way to my final rest. “See if we can get through to her.”

A voice yelled from the edges of my consciousness; it was a yell, but I registered it as a faded whisper in the distance.

“We’ve got them, son,” Hinds said. “We’ve cleared through to the White House. It’ll all be over soon.” He spoke to someone else, but it was a blur, everything coming to a stop.

“You got her?”

Was he talking to me?

“We’ve got her, son. We’ve got her. She’s coming here, now! Stick with me.”

I closed my eye, turning my head, but he held my face, forced me to face up.

“She’s here!”

My eye flashed open, scanning, fighting the fading that surrounded me, fighting for the light to linger if only long enough to see her.

And there she was, lovely as ever, framed by the darkness that was going to take me.

“Dale! Oh, God!”

I didn’t see the bloody nose, the bruises, the sweat and the smeared grime. I saw her as the fairy tale, as the dream that had held me until this moment.

“I love you,” I said, feeling the flinching pain as I tried to smile.

“Damn you, don’t do this,” she said, the lie becoming real, her true face revealed. Her tears spattered on my face. For some reason, that was the only thing I could feel.

“General, contact Superdynamic. Tell him to get Templar to portal Mirage to our position.”

“Okay,” Hinds said.

“Do it!”

I tried to reach up, to touch her face, but my hands were an abomination, they made her cry further.

“Oh, baby, hang on. Please hang on!”

To have her call me that, now, at the end of everything, made it all worthwhile. Everything I had gone through, every ounce of pain racing through my body – to hear her caress me with her voice washed it all away. My face complained as I smiled, and the darkness swept in, hard and fast.

“Dale!” was the last I heard as I fell back into a dark pool at night, washed over and engulfed by the water.

People lie.

I didn’t see a light at the end of a tunnel. It was a deep dark pool, with a slow, incessant current dragging me down, away from everything. And it’s a lie that you see your distant relations come to welcome you into the afterlife, to guide you to ... wherever it is you’re going. No one I knew came, but I wasn’t alone. There were faces I couldn’t identify along the inky blackness that surrounded me, expressions that could just as easily have been my own. Each expression was wrapped in a memory darker than the last, and as I descended toward an endless void that welcomed me home, I saw the passage of time like paintings on the wall. There were no lies this deep, and no one to keep them from. I was alone, no one to impress, not even myself, and all my lies were laid bare in their absolute worst.

More memories filed in, trying to get my attention like unruly children, but I fought them back, overwhelmed by the reality of my being, by the truth of my history. I kicked the others aside, because they were expressions of the same, examples of a singular truth that I had long avoided: that I was a bully, a monster, a rage-filled creature, sated only by the fear and cowering of others. I was the bad guy, in every sense of the word, and the fluttering images confirmed it, displaying similar behavior throughout my adulthood.

There was no light to show me the way, because there was none inside me. I was a hollow beacon to all my ills, the reason for all my endless pain, and it was at that moment that I knew what I was headed for, spiraling downward into the abyss, diving headfirst into an endless oblivion.

I was going to Hell.

The dancing memories spun away, lingering above me as I fell further, faster and faster, into an endless pit of nothing. I flailed about trying desperately to slow my descent, but something drew my attention, standing out against the cold vacuum. It was palpable and close, something I could reach for. I went for it and saw it wasn’t beyond me, but inside me. It was inside my right hand, singing out as if a tiny point of light against the world of black, and after a while, it was all there was, the rest of me gone and consumed. The point of light was minuscule, hollowed, fighting to illuminate me from deep within my hand, from inside the bones. It was a pain, a faded memory of a time distant and past, perhaps beyond my lifetime, but of something good, something to hold on to.

All I had to do was grip it, to encompass it, and I knew it would lift me upward, away from all of this. I hesitated, still awash in the new truth, overcome with a rewritten history that made all truths into lies. After this, what could I trust?

The light was the only warmth I felt in the growing chill, the only comfort I felt in the welling sadness.

When it began to fade, as if I had gone too far into the cold emptiness. I began to fear that I might linger here forever, to fall further into depths I couldn’t understand.

I gripped the light, I held tight, and it lifted me. I rose gradually, a slight breeze tickling my face, but soon the world was howling past, imperceptible.

“He’s breathing!”

It was a voice that was familiar to me, but there were no voices in the cold deep. Just a wall of inky blackness everywhere I looked. Yet I had left that place so fast that it was still with me, if only in the chill in my heart. Yet I knew I was back from the pit of death. I was alive.

Something moved me, rolled me along, bouncing and carefree, and my senses slowly filtered back.

I felt my back resting against something soft, moving quickly over uncertain terrain. I tried opening my eyes, but I had no way to know if I was successful, whether my eyes were open and just not functioning, or if I’d lost the ability to see.

“Don’t move, Blackjack,” a different muffled voice said, distant and concealed, and I felt a cluster of people around me, moving with me. My ability to perceive sounds was localized, limited, and everything beyond a small range was filtered out. Whether this was a defense mechanism, or whether it was some physical error, I couldn’t tell.

“You’re going to be okay,” the first voice said. I faced the direction of this voice, but my eyes betrayed me, unwilling, or unable, to cooperate. When I tried to speak, a sour flavor danced to the back of my throat, a mix of flayed flesh and congealed blood, which reminded me of what had passed, reminded me of where I was.

I had fought Lord Mighty and lived. Now they were trying to mend my fractured body.

“Don’t worry about me,” I tried to say, but opening my mouth made me gargle on the cocktail of viscera mixed with a shattered bit of tooth that tickled the back of my throat and threw me into a violent fit of coughing. Making the effort to maneuver the shattered bone toward my lips was a herculean effort because my tongue wasn’t fully functional, like a broken arm trying to flex on unstable muscles.

Something pressed me down, the next feeling that came after the coughing fit, and a finger probed my mouth.

“Oh, my God!” This was the second voice again, somewhat less muted, somewhat closer, and I knew this person was manipulating my tongue, pressing it out of the way, reaching for something. When the hand left my face, I coughed again, but this time free of the shard of bone.

“Thanks,” I wanted to say, but again, I couldn’t tell if my mouth was working. All I could hear was the echoing of my throat gargling through my skull, reverberating into my ears.

“Don’t talk, baby, please.”

It was Apogee.

She was there, near me, close enough to fight through the haze, yet my eyes were failing me. I wanted to reach up and touch her face, to get more information, to find out what was wrong with me. But I didn’t really need to. The desperation in her voice gave me all the clues I needed as to my condition.

I wanted to see her, just a moment. Just a peek. I would willingly dive back into the pit of darkness if I could get a single look, but my eyes frustrated me. Instead, I reached for her. I let my hand search for her in the pained darkness, but I was somehow restrained.

“Where is Mirage?” Apogee cried, and I could tell she was angry. I had seen her at her rage-filled worst, and this was more desperate than that. Ironic that the woman I loved, the only person who I cared for, was someone who had wanted me dead.

“Oh, f*ck this!” she said, but I heard it afterward, a moment later, as her dissociated voice left me, and a heavy breeze wafted across my body.

“Jesus!” someone said. Was it Moe? Was he here?

“Goddammit, Apogee!” someone else roared and it only took me a moment to realize it was Superdynamic. He was above me, close, very close.

“Super,” Moe said. “I got the kit here; I need to know what to give him, man.”

I bounced, hard.

“Forget the helo, I have the jet inbound,” Superdynamic said, yelling to overcome the loudness as they brought me closer to a helicopter. I could feel the whipping of the engine-driven rotors, the whine of the supercharger, the mini-vortex of wind driven up by the rotors.

“Sir, we can have him at our medivac area in fifteen minutes,” someone else said.

“He’ll be dead by then,” Superdynamic said. “Take over the pumping for me, dammit!”

“I got it,” said Moe and then I felt the big black man replace Superdynamic over me. What did they mean by “pumping”? Were they giving me CPR chest compressions?

I blinked, and a flash of brightness almost blinded me, making me press my eyelids as tightly as possible.

“You gonna be all right,” Moe said. “You hear me, man? You ain’t going nowhere!”

A figure moved behind him, amid the chaos of people standing over me.

“Mr. Superdynamic,” it said. “I recommend you give him 50ccs of adrenaline and 500ccs of epinephrine stat, or you won’t keep his heart going.”

I laughed, but it lasted only a second as a racking fit of coughing overcame me.

“That won’t even begin to affect him,” Super responded. “We need something stronger. Jet’s inbound, ETA 2 minutes.”

“He’s dead before that,” the figure said.

“Just let me go,” I said.

Moe stopped compressions a second, and I felt his warm breath floating across my face.

“What did you say?”

“Moe, don’t stop compressions.”

“Sec, nigga. He’s trying to say something!”

“Let me go,” I said, aching for an end, daring to flash open my eyes. Or my one good eye, rather.

He stared at me, angry, bewildered. Betrayed.

“F*ck you, man. You understand me?”

I tried to smile, make a joke of it.

“It’s okay,” I mouthed.

“No, goddammit! It’s not motherf*cking okay!”

I shook my head.

“If you quit on me, you white motherf*cker, I’m going in there and I’m going to beat the f*ck out of you, you understand me? You don’t quit on me, you hear?”

I wasn’t worth this, all of this. I had done my part, been the punching bag, now it was time for me to check out. I was fine with it. I knew I had done a good deed, and besides, how could I come back from this? A broken body, a shattered spirit? How could I put it all back together? I couldn’t feel my legs, or my back, only an awful coldness that spread upward to my chest. My arms were maimed and grotesque, and I could only imagine what my face looked like. Why come back from this? Why make a grand return, when I had already said my goodbyes?

“No! You don’t quit, you hear me? You don’t ever quit.” Moe was crying. The big guy was weeping and I could feel the pitter-patter of his warm tears against my face. “You the baddest motherf*cker I’ve ever met, you understand me? You are the f*cking man. You saved the whole goddamned world, and now we gonna celebrate, Blackjack. You and me, you hear? We gonna celebrate.”

“Moe, the compressions!”

“We gonna get some medals and shit and go throw back a few and celebrate. You hear me, motherf*cker?!”

He said more, but he was shoved aside and someone replaced him, pressing at me, the rhythmic crackling of my smashed chest bones ringing through my thorax like a symphony of pain.

“Motherf*cker,” Moe said, moving back and overcome with grief.

“ETA 1 minute,” Superdynamic said, and I knew it was he who had taken over. Despite the pain I felt in my chest, I knew he was being careful, pressing only enough to keep my heart pumping blood through my pulverized body. He went on, I think complaining to the doctor who wanted to put me into the helicopter, but a hurricane of wind overcame us. Daring a peek, I saw Apogee standing there, her arms grasping Mirage’s robes. The Chinese man reacted to the sudden stop with a violent racking from his stomach, doubling over to vomit.

“Save him,” Apogee said, helping him up, and when he rose, I caught his eye; I saw the deep anger behind them.

I smiled.

“No,” he said.

“Chen, we don’t have time for this! Move back, Jeff. Everyone take a step back!” Her voice was forceful, commanding, filled with anguish.

I slid my eye closed, not having strength to keep it open further, but from Mirage’s expression, I knew he was going to let me die. I was slipping already, feeling the lapping waves of the cool, dark pool against my extremities.

“I will f*cking kill you!”

Was that me, yelling?

I didn’t know. I was rushing off, no time to talk, no time to linger on. In a moment, I was back in the dark room, alone again, the cold waters rising up to engulf me.

“Dale, no!” I heard Apogee cry in the distance, a muffled voice fighting through a heavy wind, barely carrying the sound to me.

I drifted this time, the familiar expressions with their corresponding memories dancing up to me, not bothering to taunt me this time. We were acquainted now, familiar enough that a mere glance registered full knowledge. Instead, they remained off in the distance, wary, watching me with contempt.

I didn’t belong here. This place was the lie.

I tried to summon her face, to remember what she looked like, if only to take that final glimpse with me to the bitter end. She came to me, that last image before I fell, a lined, injured face, so beautiful and loving, wracked with heartbreak and misery. She loved me, despite everything I had done, everything I had yet to make amends for.

I looked at my hand and saw the beam of light again, except it was brighter, so much that it overwhelmed the haunting memories. They faded out into the shadows and again I raced upward.

“It’s working!”

It was Apogee again, but her voice was muted by a loud, approaching whine and a heavy wind that could only mean one thing: Superdynamic’s jet.

“Dee, you’re a f*cking genius. Goddamn.” It was Moe, his voice additionally dampened by his open weeping.

I rose toward a blinding light, away from the silent, absolute darkness. I rose away from a vacuum as if every particle of my being was stretched in every direction. Bouncing about, I was carried toward this light, back to myself. Daring a glimpse, this time shot down the length of my body toward my hand, I searched for the point of light that had saved me, the beacon of hope that had brought me back from the Abyss. I saw Apogee’s fingers grasping my mangled right hand.

“It’s just too much damage....” It was Ruby, somewhere to my left. Her voice was a whisper, barely audible over the roaring of engines as Superdynamic’s ship howled above us.

“Careful with the cabling,” Superdynamic said. He was above me, pulling the stretcher up a ramp that led to the main hold of his ship. Countless wires stretched from his body, spider webbing over my face and into my shattered frame. His suit was alive with lights, moreso than I had ever seen it before. We were plugged into each other, his body keeping mine alive.

More people surrounded me, their chatter like the buzzing of flies over a corpse. Some of the other voices I recognized, like Moe, Templar, and Focus. Others were new to me, yelling orders, making requests, an aural blur.

Still holding my hand was Apogee, pushing me up to the open rear cabin of the Cicada. Her voice was soft, direct, and focused, as opposed to everything else that whirled around me.

“You’re going to be okay,” she pleaded, more with the grand forces of fate than with me.

“Lock the gurney down,” I heard Superdynamic say, and then I felt Moe moving around me, working beneath the level of my bed. Apogee had to clear away for the big man, letting go of my hand for only a moment before taking it in her steady grasp once more.

“What are we going to do?” she asked with an edge of terror in her voice, as if she knew something I didn’t.

But I did, I knew. I had made it back from the pits of hell, I had seen her once more, but there was no guarantee that my body could hold me for much longer. In fact, I doubted they could piece me back together. It was only a matter of time before it all ebbed away.

“I need to see how bad it is, first,” Superdynamic said. “Moe, get me the outgoing HDMI end of that monitor.

“Jesus, Jesus,” Madelyne said, coming closer so I could see her face.

“It’s stuck to the wall, Dee,” Moe said.

“Rip it out and bring it here,” Superdynamic retorted, the tension clear in his voice.

“Maddie,” I tried to speak, but my jaw was shattered.

“Don’t talk, Dale,” she whispered, kissing my cheek and lips.

“Excuse me,” Superdynamic said, standing over me, tearing into an arm module to modify it somehow. Apogee rolled over to my right, holding my hand with both of hers.

Moe brought over a cable that Superdynamic stuck in his mouth, stripping it with his teeth. It reminded me of what I’d had to do in the desert to make my rocket boots. Whereas I had a lack of tools in the middle of the Australian Outback, Superdynamic had no time; the shake in his hands, the sweat in his brow – now that he had taken off his helmet – were evident.

He plugged the cable into his armor and ran his hand over my body. I could feel a buzzing from him tingling against my skin as he scanned me. In the space of seconds, he had modified his palm light emitters to act as an MRI, giving him a clear picture of my insides in the nearby monitor.

“They’re giving us immediate clearance to take off,” Ruby said from the cockpit.

“Then get us to the Tower,” Superdynamic said, almost before Ruby had finished. “Damn, the major bones are pulverized.”

Someone heavy leaned against the railing to my left, opposite of Apogee. I focused and saw it was Moe.

“What the f*ck do we do?”

Superdynamic moved away from me as much as our conjoined cabling would allow and I saw the concern on his face. I didn’t need an impromptu MRI to know how badly I was injured. What his face told me was that it was far worse than just a few broken bones. My internal organs were probably shot too.

Apogee saw the same thing in her friend’s face. “Jeff, please.”

“I’m thinking,” he said.

“Do something!”

I’m thinking!” he repeated.

“Oh, God,” Madelyne’s head dropped and I felt her hair dancing on my chest.

Moe leaned in over me, “You gonna be all right, okay?” I looked over at Superdynamic and saw him cross his left arm over his chest, resting his right against the forearm and nibbling on his nail.

Focus was there, too, weaving in and out of the bunch, connecting me to sensors, working an IV into one of the many wounds on my body.

“Should I read him his last rights?” Templar said from beyond my sight.

“Who the f*ck are you?” Apogee exploded, releasing my hand.

“Apogee....” Moe started.

“I’m just concerned for his immortal soul,” Templar said.

“Look, kid. You shut the f*ck up about that if you know what’s good for you–”

“Apogee!” Moe said, but she went on over him.

“–I will f*cking throw you through a wall you hear me?”

“Apogee, calm down, goddammit!” Moe said. “He’s just being cautious.”

“F*ck cautious,” Madelyne said, her voice coated with growing desolation. “He’s going to make it.”

I felt the ship shudder and a long, slow pull as we started away, Ruby flying us across the Atlantic on a voyage that despite Apogee’s most desperate hopes, I was probably not going to make.

“Jeff, what can we do?” Apogee asked again, her voice cracking, losing all the rage she had flashed at Templar.

“Maddie,” I said, reaching for her. My arms weren’t strapped down, but it felt like arm-wrestling Epic to raise my hand just a few inches.

“Baby,” she said, coming closer again, filling what remained of my world.

“It’s okay,” I said again, but she just cried, shaking her head.

“No,” she wept.

I smiled, but I could only imagine what that grimace must have looked like.

“It’s not okay, dammit,” she said. “I have so much more to say.”

She cried, her low sobs the only sound in the cabin as Moe, Superdynamic, and the others just watched my final moments.

“I’m so sorry, Dale,” Madelyne said. “I’m sorry for everything.”

I shook my head.

“No,” she said, placing her soft fingers on my face. “You need to know.”

Madelyne looked up, sniffing back the tears, staring at the overhead lights, her big shadow keeping me from them.

“I was wrong,” she cried. “I....”

She looked back down at me, grimacing as tears streamed down her face. To me she looked more beautiful than ever, and this was reward enough for everything. If it ended now, I wouldn’t have any complaints.

“I deserved it,” I tried to say, but my mouth wouldn’t cooperate. The jaw was shattered and the inside of my mouth glistened with globs of drying blood.

She shook her head.

“I’m so sorry, Dale.”

I forced it, putting every last ounce of energy into it, ignoring all the pain of moving, of speaking.

“I love you,” I said.

Her face cracked further.

“Shut up,” she said, shaking her head with her eyes closed.

“I do,” I said.

She nodded, lowering her head to my shoulder, sobbing.

“I love you, too,” she said.

The pressure against my shoulder was painful, but the tinge was like the light in my arm, healing me with the basking glow of knowing. Now I could go. Now I could fade.

“I love you, Dale,” she repeated, her voice muffled against my skin.

I reached over with my left hand and put it on her shoulder, pressing her closer and felt her touch my head with her free hand as she pulled back and kissed me. Her first touch was tender and tentative, scared she would hurt me more, only a pair of nervous pursed lips in a tingling touch, but after a moment she settled in, her mouth opening to welcome my lips.

It might have been the one part of my body not in pain, unbroken, and now it radiated with warmth that spread throughout my broken body. Her free hand glided through my hair, touching my scalp, and her breasts and chest pressed against mine, but it was her lips that were the center of my existence, the only thing that I felt from head to toe. Until Superdynamic spoke again.

“Okay,” he said, breaking the moment’s reverie. “I think I have an idea.”

“What?” Apogee said.

“Ruby,” Superdynamic said. “Throttle us to 175% on the reactor and keep us there. I don’t care if we burn out the superthrusters.”

“You sure, boss?” Moe asked.

Apogee moved away from me and I saw the hope on her face.

“I can do some of it on the way, maybe even stabilize him,” Superdynamic said, walking closer to me.

“I need you to hold on, Blackjack,” he said, raising his voice on my account, lowering it again to speak to the others. “We’ll need to reconfigure medlab with new equipment. And make some stuff from scratch,” he said, turning back to me, lowering himself so he was inches from me. “You hear me, Dale? I think can save you, but I’m going to need to you hang on for me. You hear me?”

I nodded.

“If I’m going to do this,” he continued, “I need you to fight. I need you to want it.”

I squeezed Apogee’s hand, “I want it.”

“Good man,” he said. “You fight like hell.”

I nodded again.

“I think this will work,” he told Apogee, then stood away, speaking as he made modifications to his suit, changing modules functions from shields or weapons to whatever was needed to save my life. “Database says we have the same blood type, so I’m going to give him a blood transfusion. Moe, Rico, you guys are O positive, too. With your permission, you’re next.”

“Anything, Dee,” Moe said.

“No probs, boss,” Ricochet said, but I couldn’t see him. “What about the injuries?”

“I’ve infused him with nanites, retasked to assist his healing function and lower his temperature to give us more time. Focus, I need you to contact Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University. He’s a friend.”

Focus was already moving away, “What do I ask him?”

“He’s just recently discovered a method to reconfigure normal skin cells into stem cells. With that, and William Shih of Harvard’s theory for using DNA-origami for cell structure replacement ... and a transdermic 3D printer that I need to design....” Superdynamic paused, studying me as if debating whether I was worth the trouble. “And a new MRI I’m going to invent that interpolates the original dimensions of damaged tissue....”

He looked over at Apogee, and I knew who he was doing it for.

“Yeah, we’re going to save him,” Superdynamic said, moving off to give Focus some instructions for her call to Dr. Yamanaka.

“You hear that?” Apogee said, hopeful, still sobbing. “We’re going to bring you back.”

I smiled.

She kissed my right hand, right where the webwork of scars lay, and rubbed it against her cheek.

“You gotta stay with me, okay?”

I closed my eyes, feeling the tears stream back across my cheeks. Of course I was going to stay with her. There was nowhere else I’d rather be.