Just Cause Universe 3: Day of the Destroyer (4 page)

He’d developed his own style of Kung Fu after studying for years with some of the best Chinese masters. He called it, naturally, Lion Style. It complemented his greater-than-human strength and toughness, and incorporated many of the moves that lions themselves used when taking down prey. Faith watched the play of his muscles under his fur as he sprang and spun through the air, carving furrows in the wooden combat dummies around him, which the support staff had to replace weekly because he wore them out every few days.

He wound down his routine. The training room air was heavy with the musky scent of his sweat as he swiped a towel from a hook, worked it through his prodigious mane, and then hung it over his shoulders. He smiled at Faith with a mouthful of sharp fangs. “Early as always, I see.”

She held up a thermos. “I brought you coffee, Rick.”

“My hero.” He took it and unscrewed the top to inhale the fragrant steam.

She grinned up at him; he towered over her by a foot. “Always in the right place at the right time. That’s me.”

Lionheart laughed. “So you are, Faith. That new girl will be here today. Think you could show her the ropes?”

“Sure,” said Faith. “Make the old lady do the grunt work.”

“You’re like our House Mother. Hey!” Lionheart wasn’t fast enough to avoid Faith’s playful punch at his bicep.

“This fraternity ought to be closed down for pledge violations,” said Faith.

“What fraternity?” Sundancer strode into the dojo. Her white and yellow leotard with the triangle-shaped opening over her navel offset her dark tan. The Hispanic beauty was like a ray of sunshine in both a figurative and literal sense. A faint glow suffused the air around her, and occasional motes of brilliance spun away to burn out in the air like sparks from a campfire. She was a cross-continental transplant, having grown up in the surf country of southern California.

“The fraternity of stupid boys on this team.” Faith smiled. “It’s like a high school boys’ locker room.”

“How do you know about boys’ locker rooms?” Sundancer giggled. “You must not be quite as good a girl as you’ve led us all to believe.”

Faith and Sudancer followed Lionheart out of the dojo. As they did, Javier staggered out of one of the overnight quarters the team maintained for those heroes who needed to stay on site. The Puerto Rican hero stumbled across the hall into a bathroom. The sounds of vomiting emerged from behind the door a moment later.

Faith raised an eyebrow at Lionheart, whose nose wrinkled in distaste; with his enhanced sense of smell, he was probably getting a bad whiff of stomach acid and bile.

“Maybe we do need to review some house rules,” said Lionheart.

Javier came out of the bathroom all smiles, despite the pallor under his natural skin tone. “Rules were made to be broken,
amigos
. Or at least, bent.”

“What did you take, Javi?” asked Sundancer. “Pills? Coke?”

“No pills,” said Javier. “Too much tequila. I was doing shots with these twins. Twins, Ricky! They’re still sacked out in my room. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Pig,” said Sundancer.

“Says the centerfold,” said Javier. “Miss February had bigger tits, but you were a hell of a lot more a looker than Miss April.”

Sundancer’s glow brightened and sparks of fury shot from her eyes. She’d done a photo shoot with Devereaux’s permission; the first parahuman ever to appear in
Playboy
. She was proud of her pictorial, but Javier delighted in cheapening it.

Faith stepped between the two bickering heroes. She hadn’t minded so much that Sundancer did the glossy spread, and had even been approached numerous times to do one herself. But having to deal with Javier’s chauvinism day in and day out would grow even more tiresome if he had that extra ammunition.

“Knock it off, you two,” said Lionheart. “Save it for the bad guys.”

“What bad guys?” Javier asked.

He had a good point, admitted Faith to herself. It had been years since any parahuman criminal had dared to rear their heads and risk the wrath of the greatest superhero team in the world.

And like a muscle that didn’t get used with sufficient frequency, the team was getting soft.

#

Harlan decided to ditch summer school for the day. Again. He’d catch hell for it later from his mother, but he had a project at the junkyard that was nearing completion and felt his time was better spent there turning wrenches than learning to diagram sentences or whatever foolishness would be covered in class. Where most people saw trashed vehicles and garbage, Harlan saw opportunity. He spent as much time as possible—really, far more than was prudent—working on his fanciful projects there amid the rusting hulks of Chryslers and Pontiacs.

Harlan loved science fiction books and movies. He was a slow reader, but he struggled through a few pages every night, marking the words with his finger and sounding them out under his breath. When he could, he sneaked into movies and watched them. He had a special love for the Japanese giant monster movies, and one of them had inspired his latest project.

The massive hulking machine that would walk like an elephant and was strong enough to tear a building apart was nearly ready. Harlan imagined sitting inside it at the controls and laughing at everyone who’d ever teased him or talked down to him as he turned them into human jelly.

The first thing he had done with the abandoned junkyard was to secure it as much as he could. His gift for mechanical engineering helped him rig a crane to move heavy parts and even entire vehicles. He blocked and barred every possible way in, leaving himself only one secret entrance under a fence and through the trunk of a rusted-out Buick.

He wriggled through this tight space, pausing to disarm his security systems with a switch hidden inside the Buick. He’d installed the autonomous security devices after having problems with rats, both of the four-legged and two-legged varieties. They sensed motion and heat signatures and delivered a suitable warning: recorded sounds of dogs barking and men shouting and waving flashlights. Normally that was sufficient to scare off any stray animals or juvenile delinquents looking for cheap thrills.

And if those weren’t sufficient, well, Harlan had thought of more severe consequences.

The sentry turrets looked innocuous, placed around the junkyard in locations where they could cover significant areas. They were tied into the same systems that detected motion and heat, and if the offending intruder didn’t leave the area after a certain number of seconds, the turrets would go into action.

He called them Eggbreakers, because he’d once heard someone say
you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

Every so often, he’d find a dead dog or cat out in the open spaces of the junkyard, the victim of an Eggbreaker turret. The cleverly-designed devices fired engine block bolts like deadly projectiles, using a propellant that he mixed himself with a half dozen different ingredients including gasoline and talcum powder. It had never occurred to him that what he was doing was wrong. They were trespassers, and he didn’t even bat an eye when he cleaned up the bloody remains of a furry interloper. To the contrary, he rather enjoyed the vindication of his design.

As he crawled out of the Buick’s trunk, he found a new victim awaiting him. A man laid face down amid a large bloodstain with one hand outstretched and snagged in the tarpaulin covering the giant robot. The thick cloud of flies around the body resembled a moving shadow, obscuring the man’s tattered and shabby clothing.

Harlan froze as he took in the grisly scene laid out before him. The man might have been a hobo or vagrant. He might have come in over the fence, or even found the secret entrance by accident. Maybe he was looking for something to steal or sell for a few pennies. He’d ignored the warning sounds and gotten a little too curious for his own good. The buzzing of the flies matched the humming in Harlan’s brain. This wasn’t an accident. This was on purpose. This man was dead because Harlan had intended it. Yet he didn’t feel remorse. Instead, it made him feel powerful.

“Got you,” whispered Harlan. He pointed at the body, his arm moving as slowly as if it were underwater. “I got you, you fucker.” His extended finger drew a circle around the dead man’s head. It wasn’t enough, though. He had to see it up close.

He felt lightheaded and giddy with success as he tiptoed toward the body. Just because the man lay motionless in a bloody, muddy mess in the dirt didn’t mean he was really dead. Flies lined the edges of the congealing blood like pigs at a feeding trough. Close up, the coppery smell of death overcame even the odors of rusting metal, rotting plastic, and petroleum byproducts.

Harlan’s whole body shook as he stuck out a toe and kicked at the man. His poke elicited no response. He kicked harder. The shock of the impact of his toes against the man’s side ran all the way up his leg through his spine to explode in the pleasure centers of his brain. He kicked harder, over and over, and giggled with glee like a toddler.

“I got you, you motherfucker!” he shrieked as landed one blow after another, his foot making sounds like a sledgehammer might against a side of beef. “You thought you could just come in here and do whatever you want. Well, I sure showed you, dirtbag!” With his last word, he kicked the man hard enough to roll the corpse over.

The man’s eyes were wide open and his face frozen in a permanent mask of surprise. The hexagonal head of an engine bolt protruded from the center of his forehead.

Harlan’s breakfast launched itself out of his stomach and he vomited his corn flakes onto the ground beside the corpse. With a shaking hand, he wiped his mouth. The flies swarmed around his puke with new excitement as he backed away from the dead man before him. Harlan took a deep, shuddering breath. He felt empty, not just from vomiting, but as if someone had taken a fire hose to him and rinsed him out, leaving only an empty shell waiting to be filled anew. He wasn’t disgusted at his handiwork; he was awed. His Momma had dragged him to church regularly, but he had never had any sort of religious experience until he looked upon the face of a man he’d slain by his own hand.

Sticky wetness flooded his groin.

He’d attend to that later.

Right now, he just wanted to gaze upon his works and feel the world tremble beneath his feet. A bit of poetry that he must have read in school at some point bubbled up in his buzzing brain.
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair
. Yes, that was fitting.

“
Despair, motherfuckers,” whispered Harlan to the world.

#

Tommy sat with John Stone in the team’s conference room when the others entered. He felt at ease beside the huge man of stone. Indeed, he longed to be even closer, but settled for leaning in to share a joke André had told him. John had brought a bag full of bagels and was demolishing one between his quartzite teeth.

“All here, I see,” said Lionheart. “Where’s the Soldier?”

The air in one corner of the room shimmered and the seven-foot tall combat android became visible. “I am present. I have been testing my optical camouflage system.”

“You can turn invisible?” asked Sundancer in surprise. “That's a new modification?”

“Affirmative,” rumbled the Steel Soldier from his basso vocoder. The android was technically sexless, but when the U.S. Supreme Court declared him a sentient being with the same rights afforded to humans back in 1974, he chose to represent himself as male. Just Cause had found the Soldier in the midst of a destroyed building, the victim of unexplainable circumstances. His memory had been erased and his armored body showed signs of combat. Javelin theorized the Soldier was an involuntary time traveler, for the android’s construction was advanced beyond the capabilities of present-day technology.

“That’s cool, man. I didn’t know you could do that.” Javier eyed the bagels, but he still looked a little green around the gills. Unlike Tommy or anyone else in Just Cause, Javier had no native parahuman powers. A brilliant physicist, he’d used his extensive understanding of magnetism to develop a prototype flying suit of armor. He’d been thrown out of MIT before he could do anything with it, because his womanizing ways had led him to his Department Head’s wife. He could have taken his suit design and privatized it, or gone to the military, but instead he’d joined Just Cause as the hero Javelin.

“It is a function I have recently repaired. Unfortunately the camouflage is only effective against visual reconnaissance. I can still be easily detected through infrared or audible means.”

“Somebody say my name?” Bobby walked into the conference room. “Sorry I’m late. Cabbie didn’t speak a word of English.”

“New York. What a town.” Tommy laughed. John chuckled beside him and it made Tommy feel like a balloon was lifting him right out of his seat.

Bobby kissed Faith and then sat in the chair beside her. “Since we’re all here, I call the meeting to order.” Side conversations died down as the Just Cause heroes turned their attention to the team administrator. Lionheart led the team in the field, but behind the walls of headquarters, Bobby ran the show. “For those of you who weren’t paying attention, we have a new member joining us today. Her name is Irlene Washington and goes by the moniker Imp. She can fly and shrink herself, objects, and people.”