Blackjack Villain (26 page)

She finally caught me on the cheek and bit down hard. Though it hurt quite a bit, she couldn’t bite through my skin.

“Let go of me!”

“Not until you calm down, damn it!”

“I’m going to kill you!” she howled hysterically, with tears streaming from her face. She shook against my grasp, breaking free, and started punching me without mercy. Apogee’s blows were wild and desperate, and her fists a furious blur. Her face was filled with passion and enmity. I threw my hands up defensively, blocking most punches but nothing could fully protect me from that onslaught. She finally threw a nasty hook around my guard that caught my mouth and blood flew, spattered on the wall.

When Apogee saw blood, she grew more unhinged, and reared back for a killing blow. I pushed her off me, using all my remaining strength, sending her flying across the lobby again. She crashed into one of the pillars under the balcony that overlooked the first floor and collapsed in a heap of marble, concrete and steel.

She was still.

I ran outside to join the others, feeling the effects of Cool Hand’s hasting power beginning to fade from me. On the street, the situation was chaotic and ridiculous at the same time. Cool Hand’s worst fears were realized as the ‘Guidos’ had joined the fight. They were a bunch of steroid monkeys. Muscle-bound guys with weird, blown out haircuts and way too much time spent in tanning salons. The only problem was that there were easily two dozen of them.

Mr. Haha was nowhere in sight, nor could I see Gamma Demon. Zundergrub had unleashed the yellow imp, which now was a huge monster, almost fifty-feet tall. The monster was fighting FTL, and Zundergrub himself was facing off against Atmosphero. Cool Hand was standing toe to toe with Superdynamic, who had freed himself of the time-stop effect. Epic was standing there, still frozen. Mirage struggled with dozens of Zundergrub’s imps, impish gray across the street. They tore at his costume and ripped at his flesh and crawled all over his prone form. The imps were tiny, maybe twelve inches tall each, and were only inflicting minor wounds, but you couldn’t guess that from Mirage’s fearful shrieks.

The Guidos jumped in en-masse, like a wave crashing over us. They hopped down from the roof of the fast food place where we had landed and attacked Cool Hand first. Cool was fast, but they were too many, and Superdynamic took advantage of the sudden help. I had to do something or fast or they would drop him. My bow lay on the street, somewhere, probably broken, but I still had my arrows and I was pretty strong.

“Incoming!” I shouted at my beleaguered friend, and reached for one of my special arrows. A few Guidos grabbed him, and Superdynamic was readying for a final punch, suddenly they were still, the effects of Cool’s temporal powers. He freed himself from their grasp, and sped off so fast it was like he had blinked out of existence. A second later my arrow landed at Superdynamic’s feet.

One second the street was semi-lit from the helicopters overhead, the next it was engulfed in a flash of 300,000 lumens, almost three times brighter than the sun at daylight, and a moment later there was a loud, localized pop of about 300 decibels. That was almost twice as loud as Led Zeppelin at their noisiest.

Superdynamic dropped to the ground an instant after the pop, as if someone had shot him in the head. The sensors of his helmet must have amplified the flash bang grenade, overloading his senses. The effect on the Guidos was almost as devastating. Most collapsed unconscious, while others stumbled around dazed with blood staining their nostrils and ears. Despite being almost fifty feet away, I was also stunned and it took me a few seconds to recover.

Zundergrub was near me, and gave me a nod when I came to. “I could use some help,” he managed, throwing himself aside to avoid a bolt of lightning from Atmosphero. My nemesis had taken to the air, and was bombarding the doctor. His black imps were throwing themselves into the lightning, diffusing and even eliminating it, but Atmosphero had an endless power source, and Zundergrub was running out of imps.

I stood and walked towards Atmosphero. “Come on, you prick. Get down here and let’s do this.” He stopped his assault on Zundergrub, giving him a chance to move behind me to engage more of the Guidos.

“You shouldn’t have taken off your mask, Dale,” Atmosphero said as he landed before me. “Now they’ll all know who you are.” He waved his hand at the gathered crowd. They had thinned out when the yellow imp had gone ‘Godzilla’ but a few still stood around, as did some of the news crews.

“I don’t care anymore.”

“There won’t be a safe place left in this world for you.”

“Like there was before? I recall you busting out my wall when I was in my underwear.”

He laughed. “I should have dealt with you there then.”

“Finished me off? That’s mighty mercenary of you.”

“You weren’t much of a challenge,” he said. “Or don’t you recall?”

“We’ll see about that, now.”

I took a swing at him, but he avoided me and swung back, catching me across the face. I nearly collapsed on the street from how hard he had rocked me.

“I don’t need my powers to beat you,” he said, hitting me again, this time a low left hook to my body, and followed up with a brutal right cross that sent me sprawling across the street, and over a damaged car on the curb. I didn’t know what it was, but I was tired, exhausted. Was it the pummeling I had received from Apogee? I couldn’t tell.

He was on me again, using his powers to fly over the car landing next to me as I came to my feet. A wide punch across the face sent me crashing into the car. He propped me with his left hand and unleashed a flurry of right hands to my face and stomach that I could do nothing to defend against. In fact, my hands were hanging limp and I couldn’t move them. I was helpless to his assault, nauseous, bloody and beaten once again. He stepped back and I collapsed to my hands and knees.

“Had enough?” he asked, and kicked me in the face, throwing me back at the smashed side of the car.

I couldn’t explain it; he was beating me easily for a second time. There wasn’t anything I could do against him, not even raise my hands to defend myself. The strange thing is that I was fine prior to him landing in front of me. It had to be something he was doing, some undefined power. It was the same thing he had done to me when he had thrown the house on me. We had been at range for a bit, but suddenly he landed next to me and I was done for, my hands useless as he unleashed on me.

Amidst the punishment, all I could figure was that he was doing something to me with his powers.

“Cheating bastard,” I managed taking blow after blow.

Atmosphero smiled. “Now it’s time for me to have some fun.”

I got to my feet, and tried to move my arms, to no avail. He hit me again, this time a stylish side kick. I took it and kept trying to move my arms but they wouldn’t budge. I wasn’t just tired and helpless, I was immobilized.

Atmosphero laughed and did his best Bruce Lee scat dance, as he threw two fast jabs at my face, rocking my head back with each blow. He was hamming it up for the cameras.

“I’m going to beat on you until you’re nothing but a pile of mush,” he spat. “Then I’ll parade you in front of the cameras, and get a big bonus from the government out of it.”

“Cheating bastard,” was all that I could say before I took a solid right cross to the face and staggered back.

My feet. I could still move my feet. I kicked him which totally surprised him. It was a clumsy blow, but strong enough that he crashed backwards into the hotel’s façade. I felt his hold on my arms abate and I was on him in a second, picking him up and slamming him into a wall.

“Using your wind powers to pin my arms,” I bellowed into his face. “That’s not so nice.” I punched him in the face, feeling his jaw shatter and cheek collapse. His eyes were rolling back in their sockets as he lost consciousness, but I wanted nothing more than to hurt him, to embarrass him as he had done to me.

I picked him up over my head and hurled him into the same car he had used to prop me up. He flew through the air and smashed into the side of the vehicle, the force of impact rocked the car back ten feet. Atmosphero collapsed in a heap in the middle of the street, but I ran over and picked him up. I brought his face closer to me but he was unconscious. All my rage, all the weeks of humiliation at his hands welled over me. “I should have finished you,” he had said earlier, and now I was tempted to break his fucking neck.

I honestly was.

Some of the few remaining people on the street screamed, drawing my attention away from Atmosphero to Apogee, who climbed out of a shattered window of the destroyed front of the hotel.

“Don’t do it,” she said.

She was calm now, but covered in dirt and soot, a bit of blood dripping from her nose.

“I wasn’t going to,” I said. I stared for a while at Atmosphero’s bloody face, to remember this moment, and let him go. He slumped to the floor.

“Now what?” I asked, turning to face her. I had nothing left. I was beaten, bruised and battered. And I was slowed.

Apogee looked over the fight and saw it was over. The Superb Seven were beaten. Atmosphero, Superdynamic and Mirage were down. Epic was still frozen by Cool’s effect. The few remaining conscious Guidos were tending to their fallen friends I had dispatched with the flash bang arrow. Gamma Demon was gone, undoubtedly chasing Mr. Haha into an ambush of the robot’s design. FTL was the only hero still fighting, and doing well, but he was mostly taunting Zundergrub’s yellow monstrosity away from the city.

“I’m at the rocket,” Cool Hand’s voice came over the comms. “Anyone wants a ride, better get your ass in here now.”

I stood up to Apogee, as best as I could. If she wanted to keep going, I had no recourse. It was her call. But she walked up to me, standing face to face with me. She was struggling to control herself. If she let go, let me really have it as she had in the lobby, I was done for. There’s only so much punishment a person can take, and I had gone over that threshold long ago. And now that we had a momentary pause, that adrenaline rush that had kept me going was gone.

I stumbled away from Apogee, slipping on the sidewalk and falling into the demolished side of the car, but she rushed me and grabbed my collar. Apogee reared back her fist, the anger coming back to her, the memory of her fallen comrade returning.

“Bastard,” she said.

I leaned back a bit, content that I had done my part. Zundergrub and Cool would escape in the Rocket Flyer. Mr. Haha was long gone with the Tesla device. The Superb Seven were beaten. I was collateral damage, and it was a small price to pay. We had won.

So I started laughing.

She tensed at first, expecting me to come at her, but I had nothing. Not after fighting both Apogee and Atmosphero. No energy, no strength, no will. I had arrows, sure, but I couldn’t think which to use now, or how.

No, I was done.

After a moment of me laughing, Apogee relaxed.

“You’re crazy or something,” she said.

My laughter faded off as the rocket engines roared to life, engulfing us all in smoke. An instant later, the Rocket Flyer took off and raced up into the sky. I coughed a bit as the smoke wafted through the streets.

“And there they go,” I managed.

“Yeah, but I got you.”

I stood straight and nodded. “Yep.”

Apogee let me go and looked around for help but no one was within sight, and the smoke was still thick.

“It was a good fight,” I said but she punched me in my stomach, with almost all her strength. I doubled over and almost collapsed on the street, falling to one knee.

“That was for Pulsewave, asshole,” she said, standing over me. I noticed her fist was still powered up, so she hadn’t used her full power on that punch. Even though it bent me over, my stomach was still coated with that gray-black goo that had hardened into a rocky layer over my skin, so that blow wasn’t as bad as it should have been.

I stayed down though, and said, “I never meant for that to happen. It was an accident.”

“Like it matters.”

“It does,” I said. “To me.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Apogee snapped, but she let me stand up. “How you feel doesn’t matter one fucking bit. Not to me not to anyone. You killed a guy that had a wife and two daughters! Now who will take care of them? You ever think of that?”

I don’t know why, but at that exact moment, it all hit me. Maybe it was the post-fight exhaustion, or the breathless euphoria of having beaten the Superbs. Or perhaps it was Apogee’s mention of his wife and children, knowing the turmoil my family went through after my father’s death.

I couldn’t pin a reason for my delayed reaction to it. I knew the moment it happened, the instant Pulsewave fell over that he was dead. I knew his power set and it didn’t include anything to save him from the seventy story fall. And at that moment, I had felt remorse.

It could have been a combination of wanting to fit in with the others, fear of being considered weak and maybe even because I liked that Influx had been impressed with me “popping my cherry” on a super.

But the truth was that I hadn’t cared much about Pulsewave’s death until this moment. I hadn’t thought about it except when others brought it up. Yet now, facing a person struck by the tragedy and confronted by the fear that Pulsewave’s children would have to endure a fate similar to mine, I felt ashamed.