Chapter Three:
A Nightmare On Main Street
Mercedes Lackey, Steve Libbey, Cody Martin, Dennis Lee
We know now that the Nazis figured their “Neue Blitzkrieg” was going to paralyze us and let them roll over the top of us.
They completely forgot to plan for one simple thing.
Being wrong.
Las Vegas, Nevada: Callsign Belladonna Blue
Bella crouched in the shelter of a blast door, fear putting a metallic taste in her mouth. The door was of Cold War–era vintage, as thick as her arm was long, and it was hanging askew, blown partly out of its track by something. Were the arm cannons on those Nazi monstrosities powerful enough to do that?
Or was there something worse in there now?
She glanced over at Iron Hawk, the Navaho meta who’d been the code-talker for the Air Force metas on the German front. He was the leader for their ill-assorted bunch of babies and retirees.
He could not have been young when he’d signed up for the job back in the day, and he was old now. When her grandfather had been working alongside Oppie, he had been driving the Nazis nuts, trying to figure out what he was saying. No wonder he was here. He remembered the first go-around against them.
“This is not the time for subtle,” he was saying, looking over them all. “You all got the briefing. The weak points on that armor are the joints, the visor if they haven’t got the blast shield down, and that spot here—” He pointed at the same place in his throat where Bella would do a trach, if she had to. “The rest of the armor is too tough for anything but plasma-hot fire. So tell me, what you got? Left to right.”
Farthest left was Bella’s own high-school classmate, Fred Saltzberger. “I’ve got a pretty blast-proof hide; I’m strong and tough,” he said, the red of his blush mostly hidden by his red complexion. “I can bench-press a car easy enough. Not strong or tough enough to punch through them though—”
Iron Hawk shook his head. “Not necessary. Just throw things, the bigger, the better. Aim for the knee. I need a name for you; I won’t remember Fred.”
“Red Rock,” Fred replied instantly.
Iron Hawk nodded brusquely. “Next.”
“Top Gun. I got your plasma cannon right here.” This was the young guy who was half jump jet that had pulled Bella off her Fire Department crew. He patted one forearm. “Well, lasers, but they get plasma-hot.”
“How long a burn?” Iron Hawk demanded.
“Ten seconds. Computer-assisted targeting.”
“Visor primary, knee joint secondary target. And keep your head down, you don’t look like you’ve got enough armor to stop a pea-shooter. Next.”
That was her. “Blues, LVFD Paramedic, psychic healing.” Her jump bag was at her feet. Bag, not box. She wanted her box. Every paramedic had his or her own box, and his or her own way of organizing it. But her box was somewhere back in the ruins of the station, and this was what they had given her.
“Stay down, like you would on a SWAT assist. Next?”
“Sparky. Electrical arcs.” That was Violet, one of Bella’s best friends, engaged to Fred. “I’m guessing nothing short of a lightning bolt is going to get past the armor?”
“You’d be guessing right. Stay out of range and try and screw up their knees.” He looked around at the rest in the group. “That goes for all of you. The armor can take a direct hit from a Stinger missile. If you can’t punch through something like that, don’t try. SWAT team fire has taken out knee joints so go for those, or try and hit them with large, heavy objects.” He resumed his roll call. Bella again took inventory of her bag. She had to know where everything was, be able to put her hand on what she needed without looking.
This was going to be hell.
Within seconds of their first engagement, when Top Gun was shot right out of the air to fall headless at her feet, she knew it was going to be worse than that.
* * *
Heal and patch up. Heal and patch up. Forget even looking at minor injuries, this was combat triage—
Her supplies were long gone, and she was working off what she found in the emergency medical kits that were bolted to the wall of each room. Working for the Vegas FD inured you to a lot of things, but not to having someone decapitated in front of you.
They were about halfway through the underground complex, which didn’t bode well, seeing as they’d already taken three casualties. Top Gun, Fred, and Vi. The energy cannons were devastatingly effective. Vi had gone into hysterics when Fred went down, and arced her useless bolts of electricity at the Nazis, only to be hit by three cannons at once. There wasn’t enough left of them now to fill a single casket.
Bella could feel hysterics of her own boiling just under the surface. If she survived this, her breakdown was going to be spectacular.
There was something else building inside her too; it felt like pressure, like a migraine or the way some people could feel a seizure coming.
She had scant time to think about what that could mean though, not with people dropping and the fire from energy cannons taking divots out of floor, walls, and ceiling.
Half the lights were out, and they were fighting from room to room in a crazy quilt of fluorescent brightness and shadow, crawling through holes where doors used to be. The complex had been built to Cold War standards, meant to take direct hits from nuke-armed ICBMs, so what was load-bearing was still standing, but the cinder-block and Sheetrock internal walls were no match for what had invaded.
And the noise…the whine of weapons powering up, explosions, the howl of the alarm system—screams—
There were bodies, some dead, some still alive, everywhere. Mostly bodies in military uniform; some few in suits and lab coats, a couple in coveralls. She stopped to check each one, which tended to drop her behind the rest. That was where most of her supplies had gone: to the injured and unconscious here in the complex.
Because members of her team didn’t need her supplies. They needed her psychic ability to push cells into replicating and healing so fast you could see the wounds closing. Nothing less would do, because anything less wouldn’t get them back in the fight.
You didn’t get something for nothing, not even with a psychic power. The energy for that came from her; she burned herself up to heal them. In the ambulance she gulped pure glucose. Here…
Here she was on her own.
“Blues!” Another shout from up ahead and she hurried to catch up, scrambling over a tumble of cinder blocks and across the wrecked desk, coughing on the smoke from something on fire at the other end of the room. Even as she coughed, the sprinkler system went off, and she swept wet hair back as she scuttled around another cubicle wall to where she “felt” someone in agony. A guy calling himself “Turbine.” Speedrunner; not all that useful until about six rooms ago he’d figured out he could spin like a top and knock the suits over. When they were knocked on their asses, they couldn’t shoot at anyone.
Except someone must have gotten off a shot at him, indirect or he wouldn’t be alive. Maiden America, one of the war vets, was holding him. Bella put her bare hands against his bare flesh, and immersed herself.
It was a gestalt sort of thing, somehow she “knew” where to send her psychic energy, what to heal first—
First off, block off consciousness. He didn’t need to be here for this. He stopped screaming and she didn’t have to look at him to know his eyes were closed.
—tear in the pericardium—
She sent the heart cells into a frenzy of replication, being “in there” was like being in a mosh pit, except that she had a modicum of control in there.
—broken ribs—
Bones were harder, they didn’t heal as fast. She bolstered them with cartilage as she lifted the pieces into place, gluing the bits together with the flexible stuff, better for her purposes than bone, really.
Finally—chest muscles—
Turbine’s chest looked like hamburger, but that didn’t matter. Beneath her hands, rivers of cells flowed into place, the muscles were rebuilt, strand by strand, fiber by fiber. Veins and arteries, nerves rejoined. And the last step, the easiest, skin crept across the muscles that had once been open wounds.
Then a jolt to his head, to bring him out of it. He came awake all at once, his mouth opened to scream when he suddenly realized he wasn’t in pain. Maiden America heaved him up. “Get back with the others, and be more careful,” she growled, as the kid—younger than Bella for sure—felt his chest.
She felt him turn, felt the thanks welling up in him, but she was already gone, following the next thread of agony, the next call of “Blues!”
They were dropping faster now, and she felt lives ebb away before she could even get to them.
She was crying, crying now, and she couldn’t stop. And she ran out of energy just as Iron Hawk went down. She put both her hands on him and tried to squeeze out something, anything, but there wasn’t anything left to give.
She lifted her head, about to howl with anger and grief, and looked straight up into the visor of a Nazi.
And something inside her snapped.
She did what she had sworn never to do, from the moment she knew she was telempathic. Ruthlessly, coldly, she reached inside his head—
Brain scrambled, he went down, twitching. Two of the team fell on him, and cut arms and legs off at the joints. The occupant of the suit didn’t even register the pain as his life bled out and Bella did nothing to stop it.
Still holding the lifeless body of Iron Hawk, feeling like a bundle of sticks in her arms, she sent out her mind three more times, invading the minds of the Nazis, to paralyze one with fear, throw the second into a mire of confusion, and the third—oh, the third—him she gifted with his own paranoia, a fear that all of those around him were traitors and would kill him, and made that fear real. The best-armed of the lot, he began strafing his own men until, finally, one of them brought him down.
And then her rage ran out, leaving her holding onto the verge of consciousness with the tips of her fingernails.
But it was enough. That turned the tide. And as soon as she knew they didn’t need her anymore, she let go of consciousness and slid down into a place where, for a little while, there were no tears, no grief.
And no guilt.
At least, for now.
Atlanta, Georgia, USA: Callsign Victoria Victrix
The gunman behind her sent another volley of automatic fire past her, into the fray. This time the barrage took out the elbow joint of the first metatrooper target. The bottom half of the arm, the half with the energy cannon in it, flailed uselessly.
Vickie backed up, one slow step at a time, until she fell in with the line of Atlanta SWAT cops that the armored vehicle had disgorged. By the time she reached them, she and they had fallen into rhythm. Where they missed the joints, bullets pinged and whined away, but where they hit the joints…that was the vulnerable spot. Vickie kept the active Nazis off their feet, while the SWAT team concentrated on rendering one Nazi helpless at a time.
When one went down for good, all four limbs rendered useless, she buried him. That might not kill them, but maybe they’d bleed to death, or their oxygen would give out, or an OpTwo or Three would show up to give them the coup de grace.
“This is…” she panted, “…frickin’ brilliant…”
One of the snipers next to her grunted. “Lost six SWAT teams workin’ it out.”
Six? Six? Atlanta PD didn’t lose more than one SWAT member over the course of a year, and they’d lost six teams? Atlanta SWAT had Echo OpOnes on it…
How many of these things were there?
And if this was what was tearing up a blue-collar neighborhood, what was going after the important targets?
What was going after Echo HQ?
Suddenly a shadow fell over them, and one of the SWAT guys in the process of reloading looked up.
“Mary, frickin’ Mother of God…”
Vickie whirled.
All that came out of her throat was a whimper.
It was one of the spheres, bristling with tentacles, bearing down on them with horrible slowness. Half the SWAT team turned and started firing on it, but there were no vulnerable places on this thing, not to bullets, anyway.
They were dead.
She heard energy cannon behind her start to ramp up. She saw ports for more cannon open on the side of the sphere.
And then—
“I bring you Fire and the Sword!”
The voice was a trumpet call from above, a clarion cry that both elated and terrified, filled the ears and the soul, and suddenly the sky was awash with flames.
Vickie had seen metas before. OpThrees and even once, at a distance when she was with her parents, one of the near-legendary OpFours, Amphitrite, who might or might not have been the real, genuine goddess, the wife of Neptune of myth.
This was no metahuman.
She hovered in the midst of fire, was clothed in fire, bore a flaming sword in one hand and a flaming spear in the other. Her hair was living flames, and her wings, easily thirty feet across, blazed like those of the phoenix.
There was a reason why, in the truly old texts, the first thing out of an angel’s mouth when it manifested were the words, “Fear not.” It was because the first sight of an angel should turn your knees to jelly and your guts to water, and throw you down onto your face with sheer Glory-induced terror.
Half the SWAT team did fall down; Vickie would have, but terror locked all her limbs and she couldn’t have moved now. All she could do was look. Look on the face of a creature that lived to look fearlessly into the face of God.
The angelic warrior darted straight up, avoiding all the grasping tentacles as easily as if they were waving blades of grass. She alighted on the top of the sphere, paused for a heartbeat, then drove the spearpoint home, slamming the spear down until her fist hit the top of the sphere with a hollow boom.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the sphere started to wobble, then kite sideways. The tentacles thrashed, entangling, two hanging limply.
The angel leapt off, landing on one knee on the ground before Vickie, as the sphere struggled to rise, but canted over, reeling drunkenly over the housetops until it was obscured by trees—
—the angel engaged the first of the two remaining Nazis, flinging up her hand as she passed it. A wash of flame engulfed the visor—
—she spun in an impossible backward move, slashing that blade of fire through both knee joints of the second without even looking at what she was doing, ending up on the other knee, head bowed—
Both Nazis crumpled and fell over backwards, into the mounds of dirt and rocks and torn-up asphalt left by Vickie’s magic.
A crystalline sphere of silence surrounded them. Outside that sphere, sirens and car alarms wailing, distant screaming, the sounds of gunfire, rockets, energy weapons and explosions.
Inside that sphere—the sound of a single rock clattering down the mound echoed like an avalanche.
The angel looked up. Her eyes were a solid blaze of gold.
She Looked into Vickie’s eyes. Saw everything. Vickie felt it. Every mistake and fear, every fault and hope, every secret, the smallest memory, were all laid bare in one white-hot instant.
There was a flash of unbearable pain across the angel’s face. It was there for only an instant, and then it was gone again, leaving no trace behind—
—or was there?
One tear slid down the perfect cheek, across the serene and glorious, unhuman face.
The angel opened her lips.
“Run,” she said.
One word that filled Vickie’s ears and heart and soul and left no room for anything else. Her body reacted while her mind still reeled, stunned.
She ran.
She did not stop running until she reached Coldwater Apartments, somehow untouched. Her apartment was as she had left it. She snatched up Grey and locked them both in the closet. She shook and cried and curled into a fetal ball and did not come out again until the last of the noise of combat was over and the night was heavy with cordite and smoke and utter, utter silence.
New York, New York, USA: Callsign John Murdock
John was in the middle of helping a mother and her child over to the subway entrance when the bottom of the world fell out. A short brick wall back in the direction he had fled from came tumbling down. Through the dust, he could make out the silhouette of one of the armored troopers; it had already started scanning for targets of opportunity. He wasn’t more than fifty feet away from the trooper, by far one of the closest people. Those that were still out on the streets finally recognized that there was imminent danger, and predictably panicked. The armored monstrosity stepped through the brick rubble, raising its arm cannons to fire.
It took John a few moments, but he remembered that he still had a gun on him: a battered 1911 .45, GI issue. Practically an antique, but he’d bought it cheap and under the table from a shady gun dealer. He felt an all-too-familiar twinge, an urge to do something…drastic. No, no powers. The normal gun, on a normal man: nothing else was safe. Five years on the run had proved that.
John unholstered the pistol in a smooth motion from the holdout holster in the small of his back, taking aim at the trooper’s center of mass. He squeezed off four shots in rapid succession; the .45 had some kick to it, but he hardly felt it. The heavy slugs pinged off of the trooper’s chest plate. John had placed the rounds in a tight group, but there wasn’t even a dent in the armor. He advanced, taking up an aggressive stance as he set his sights on the front grill in the armor’s blast helmet. Four more shots, all direct hits save for one that merely glanced off of an antenna. This last bullet got the trooper’s attention; his cannons relaxed at his sides as he stomped up to John. One man with a pistol wasn’t a threat to such an unholy terror.
John performed a tactical reload with a fresh pistol magazine, letting the spent magazine fall to the ground. He slowly backpedaled, firing in measured intervals at his opponent. A flash of red to the left of John’s peripheral vision caught his attention; a red-headed and freckled teenager was standing on a stoop, frozen in place.
“Kid, run! Go!”
The teen just stood there, eyes fixed wide with terror at the oncoming figure. John gritted his teeth, reloading his last magazine.
The trooper decided that it was time to quit fooling around; it took two large steps towards John, who was still firing at its head, putting him within reach of its massive arms. John finished off the last of his ammunition; the Nazi hadn’t even paused, not after being shot a total of twenty-two times. Well, now what? he thought, dropping his pistol onto the asphalt. The skull helmet of the trooper’s armor canted downward, malicious red eyes staring holes into John. Tinny speech came through a grill in the helmet—it sounded German—followed by a guttural laugh. Lacking a meaningful response, John flipped the trooper off. The Nazi raised his arm cannon, leveling it at John’s head. An ultrasonic whine—audible to him, but probably too high a frequency for anyone else to hear—issued from the raygun as it powered up, about to turn him into a smoldering corpse. John’s only thought before the explosion was of concern for his parents; he really hoped that this wasn’t going on where they were.
Again the twinge, the—automatic reaction—do it!
No. Not here. He couldn’t take the chance—
Better he die than—
John’s thoughts ground to a halt, violently interrupted. There was a flash and heat, and the next thing John knew, he was crumpled in the gutter on the other side of the street. Stars exploded in front of his eyes as he sat up gingerly; his ribs creaked in protest. I’m really getting tired of things exploding. He felt warm, as if the temperature outside had risen 20 degrees when he wasn’t paying attention.
Where he had been standing was the Nazi—only its entire right side lay unevenly melted, the suit locked upright despite the fact that the right arm, torso, and part of the head were missing. John’s head swam. Weapon backfire? What—?
It didn’t make any sense, though. Asphalt, brick, metal railings on the stoops: they were all melting and combusting. It took John a few moments to notice a human figure in the flames, and that’s when it clicked—the red-headed kid.
The teen, his features completely obscured by the fires that seemed to now comprise his form, walked past the gruesome statue that the Nazi had become.
He paused, and through the veil of plasmatic fire, John watched as he raised his hands and bent his head to look at them, marveling at his arms and body.
A voice came out of the fires, curiously, still the voice of a kid.
“Oh my god—dude! I’m a meta!” John didn’t respond, but the kid didn’t seem to be talking to anyone but himself.
The teen walked up to the dead trooper, and then placed his hand on the trooper’s waist, the only spot he could reach; the metal of the armor glowed red, split and cracked, then started to melt and pool at his feet. The rest of the armor immolated after a few seconds, sending a foul cloud of black smoke into the air.
“Holy crap!” The kid sounded as if someone had just given him a Ferrari for his birthday. Surely this hadn’t sunk home with him yet. He was still in some kind of video-game world where none of this carnage was real and it could all be restored with a reboot. “This is awesome! I’m a meta!” He turned his head towards John. “Did you see that? I melted him!”
John finally stood up; his sopping wet shirt and jacket were now covered with equal parts water, blood, and grime. Holding a hand against his ribs, he walked to retrieve his empty and useless pistol. “Yeah, I was there, kid.” It hurt to speak; hell, it hurt to do anything. John had to raise his hand to shield his face against the heat emanating off of the teen.
“Dude! We gotta find more of these guys!” The kid was practically jogging in place. “Come on! Time to kick ass! What’re you standing there for? Let’s go!”
“Whoa! These bastards mean business. You can’t just go chargin’ off after ’em; you don’t know how many there are, what kind of weapons they’re using, anything. And what about the people around here? They’re the one’s that’re gonna get killed if you get into some sort of fire fight.” He looked the kid up and down quickly, taking stock of the blazing teen. “No pun intended.” He stripped off the rags of what had been his jacket, torn to the point of being useless and ruined, and never mind the grime. John took a few steps back, noticing steam rising from his wet clothing; the fires the kid was putting off were getting hotter.
“Oh come on, dude, I melted the jerk!” the kid scoffed. “Like what’s gonna be able to stop me?” John only managed to shake his head, looking down at the puddled essence of what used to be part of the trooper.
Then something blotted out the sun from above.
They looked up simultaneously.
He’d thought the trooper was bad news. This was nightmare. The floating sphere looked like something straight out of a 1950’s science-fiction magazine. It looked mean.
A moment later his assumption that the round orange holes were gunports was confirmed when it vaporized the top three stories of a couple of buildings just so it could pass. John and the teen both ducked as small bits of debris rained down into the street around them. He envisaged what would happen if a flying meta tried to approach it. If the guns didn’t find their target, the tentacles surely would.
“What could stop you? How ’bout one of those?” The sphere passed over the street without further incident; apparently, it had more important things to destroy than some residential buildings. “We have to get the hell outta this city, and fast. There’s no tellin’ what other sorta choice horrors those things brought with ’em.”
The kid balled both his fists at his side. “You chickenshit! We gotta do something! If you won’t, I will!” He whirled and headed off at a run back in the direction the Nazi had come, flames streaming out behind him, like the tail of a comet.
John cursed everything under the sun, spitting on the ground. Dammit! Stupid kid! He’s just gonna get himself killed…John watched as the kid’s blazing form ran down the street, superheating the asphalt under his every step. The smart thing to do would be to run in the opposite direction of where the kid was. Stay away from the main roads, make his way back to his bolt-hole in the woods, or make a new one for that matter. With this going on, he didn’t much reckon there’d be a lot of priority on chasing squatters out of national parks. But…
But…
The screaming in the distance…men, women, children. People like his own folks. And not a damned one of them stood a chance without some outside help. Without some meta help.
John cursed again. Cinching up his belt, John took off at a sprint after the teen.
The kid’s trail wasn’t all that hard to follow; John just had to look for the spot fires of rubbish or molten footprints in the asphalt. He could hear the troopers, or at least the end results of their destructive spree. Explosions, screams cut short, the screech of metal being shorn off by concussive blasts: John knew he was getting close. His stomach tightened, and he felt himself break out into a cold sweat. This is going to suck.
Going to? It already sucked. This was just going to suck personally.
John rounded a corner into a passage between two brownstones, barely wide enough for him to squeeze his shoulders through. He emerged into a narrow alley just big enough for some dumpsters. Turning right, he saw a small crowd of civilians running and hobbling away; to his left, the kid, crouched down partially behind a dumpster. As he neared the boy, the alley started to feel like a kiln. Keeping his voice down to a whisper, John got as close as he cared to to the fiery teen. “All right, Ace. What’s the plan now?”
“Get the jump on ’em,” the kid replied, sounding not at all surprised that John had shown up after all. Well that was how it happened in movies, right? The meta makes a speech and the reluctant old coot comes along.
Of course, usually the reluctant old coot ended up the dead old coot.
“Fine.” John paused for a moment, gauging where the troopers were along the street by the sound of their steps. “Wait until they’re past us about 30 feet, then lay into ’em. Any way you can shut your fire off?”
“I dunno how I turned it on, and you want me to shut it off?” the kid asked crossly.
“All right, all right. Just try to stay behind the dumpster as much as possible; if they spot us in here, though, we’re dead.” Besides the dumpster, there wasn’t any cover, and there wouldn’t be any chance for them to retreat. It was a kill-chute. A rotten place to stage an ambush. If it had been John alone—or John’s choice—
Well, he wouldn’t have been here.
Before he could give any more instructions to the kid, the troopers came into view. One, two, three—five of them in all. They were walking abreast, just marching down the street and destroying anything that struck their fancy. They acted as if they didn’t have a care in the world, and in those suits, they probably didn’t. He held his breath as they passed, wondering if they’d spot the kid’s flames. Luckily, they didn’t; probably just ignored it, thinking it was another of the spot fires their attack had caused.
It didn’t take the armored soldiers long to move down the street; a few strides, and they were in just the right position—
The kid burst out from behind the dumpster, dashing into the street. “All right, you bastards!” the kid yelled, his voice breaking. “Eat fire!” He grappled with the one nearest him, and his flames went white-hot.
This was it. Maybe it was seeing the sphere that had changed everything. Maybe it was just seeing the kid…
I can do this. I can keep the lid on it. And…He had to be honest with himself, finally…I have to. Nothing less is going to stop them.
John emerged more cautiously, sticking close to the wall. He took a deep breath, concentrating for a moment, remembering his training from years ago—
A feeling inside of something lurching awake, and a nanosecond of pain, a worse moment of uncertainty, of teetering right on the brink of control and there it was. Fire cascaded down his hands. It’d been a long time since he’d used his powers; getting them started was the hard part, the worst was to try to control them. Now, all he needed to do was…relax. The fire coalesced at his palm, concentrating and building upon itself; a moment later, it leapt from his outstretched hand, lancing out at the centermost Nazi. The fire washed over his armor, turning it red-hot after mere seconds. Before John could get off another wave of flame, one of the troopers on the outside of their skirmish line raised his arm cannon, and fired.
The shot went wide and down; not very well aimed. Concrete erupted where the beam struck, jagged holes gouged out of the street.
John dodged anyway, as the kid screamed something his mother would have blanched to hear and lunged for the trooper’s arm, letting go of the one he’d grappled with.
Or, more precisely, letting go of what was left of the one he’d grappled with. The rest abruptly realized they had something more immediate to worry about than John.
John displaced, running in a diagonal arc to the skirmish line; the human eye followed horizontal and straight-line movement best, so this move would give him an extra half second, hopefully. He relaxed his internal guard more; the fire collecting at his hands surged, setting the elements in the air around it ablaze. A twitch, and a solid beam of fire cut into his original target. The trooper staggered, then fell backwards. His chest had been melted through, almost to the back of his armor. The man inside was instantly cooked. Three troopers were left; the kid was dealing with the one that had shot at John, and the other two were just now coordinating. Both were leveling their weapons at the kid.
Reflexively, John snapped off a wave of plasma; it blazed forth at phenomenal speed, glancing off of the asphalt a meter in front of the two unoccupied troopers. It arced up at just the right angle to catch both of them at one knee each. The plasma wave sheared through metal and flesh, instantly throwing both of them off-balance even before their brains registered the pain. They both toppled in a heap, their weapons discharging harmlessly into the air. At least I hope it was harmless. They were still threats, though, even though their mobility was gone. John rushed them, gouts of flame shooting forth ahead of him. The downed troopers both writhed as their armor turned into twin furnaces, immolating them. The one furthest to the left managed to fire off a shot of actinic energy before he succumbed to the fire; the bolt of blue-white energy struck a car that John was running by, crushing it and detonating its fuel tank. The blast threw John to the ground, skidding him across the street.
Once again, as his head impacted the street, John saw stars. This was getting old.
When his vision cleared, he looked up in time to see the kid shoving his burning hand through the chest of the trooper he’d grappled with, fire now so hot there was only the faintest hint of yellow at the edges of his flames. The hand emerged out the back of the armor. The kid pulled his fist back then. All the joints in the armor must have fused; it still stood upright.
John picked himself up off of the ground, almost dragging himself up. He could feel a few new cuts, as well as a nice bit of road rash from where he slid on his right arm. By all rights, he should have been numb by now, but…no. No such luck. This was just pain on top of earlier pain, even as his own metahuman body started the recovery and healing process. Resting his scraped and bruised palms on his knees, he looked up to see the carnage that he and the kid had wrought: four troopers lay smoldering on the asphalt, with one still upright in a caricature of life. A long time ago, he might have felt sick to his stomach. But that was—before. When he was just a little older than this kid. When he was plain old John Murdock, and no one wanted to kill him. The kid was taking a step back from the last trooper that he had killed. It was getting hard to look at him straight on.
“Kid,” John managed to wheeze between his teeth. “You gotta shut it off.”
“I—can’t—” came the voice from the core of the fire. Then, more panicked, as the core went from white to blue-white, “I can’t! I can’t! How do you turn this off? You got fire. Tell me how to turn it off!”
Damn it. John looked around, trying to find something that might be able to put the kid out. Something, anything—there! John snapped his hand up, pointing to a fire hydrant. “There! Snap that off, douse yourself!” John jogged over, staying a safe distance away from the new meta.
The kid lurched for the hydrant, and his hand scarcely touched it before the cap had melted, then the body of the hydrant, then water geysered up out of the stump.
And turned to steam, flash-boiled before it even touched him.
The kid was his own fuel somehow. Maybe he was burning the very air. Nothing around here was going to touch the heat—
“We have to get you clear, get you away from these buildings. Can you fly?” he shouted over the gushing hydrant, the howl of the kid’s own flames, and the noises in the distance.
“I—don’t—” the kid began, and then shot into the air like a rocket. “Make it stop! Shut it off!” was the last thing John heard before he got too far away to hear his screaming over the cacophony around him.
The kid became nothing more than a flicker of light in the sky, which quickly changed into a second sun, not because the kid was falling, but because he was, somehow, getting brighter and hotter. His fires were blazing too hot, ramping up too fast—now they really were consuming the very air around him.
Ah hell! He’s going crit—
There was another flash, followed by a too-loud subsonic boom. John was blinded for a moment, falling backwards onto the ground; everything seemed to blur around him again. There was a blossom of fire in the sky, right where the kid had last been.
His heart stopped. Damn it…goddamn it all. His vision swam again, his eyes focusing and unfocusing. He wouldn’t look away, though. He didn’t even know the kid’s name…
—then—
Bursting through the heart of the fire flower, another creature of flame.
Wings of fire that spread across a quarter of the visible sky, human—if a human could be clothed in fire—
It cradled a still form in its arms as tenderly as a mother would cradle a child.
It? No—not “it.” He.
He Looked down at John for one heart-stopping moment. John felt like a bug impaled on a needle. Felt as if his whole life had just been read. Felt—
He wasn’t sure what he felt. Grief too great to bear, fear, awe—portent?
But there was no doubt he heard something. A voice, a voice that cut through everything, even though it was only a whisper. It was a whisper that shook him to his roots.
Live.
As quickly as the emotions and the whisper came, they were gone. The figure vanished in an instant, almost as if it had never been there. John collapsed backwards again, panting. It was all just too much for him, too much in one day and too fast. Passing out was a relief. Even…a reprieve.
Moscow, Russia: Callsign Red Saviour
The troopers clustered in squads of five, coordinating their fire against CCCP metas or the crowd. Each of the CCCP metas had attracted their own squad. The armor of the troopers withstood their attacks; only Chug and Worker’s Champion appeared to be holding their own against the Nazis, toppling them with mighty blows. Yet the troopers climbed back to their feet and grappled with the ultrastrong metahumans again. Red Saviour couldn’t understand it. Worker’s Champion had gained a reputation for tearing apart Panzer tanks in the Great Patriotic War. Either the elder meta’s powers had waned as her father’s had, or this Nazi armor was more than just a metal suit. She glimpsed his eyes, wild with freshly-recalled hatred under disheveled hair.
People’s Blade seemed no more than a child amongst the giant Nazis. She leapt from one to the next, drawing sparks when her purportedly magical sword glanced off their armored shells. Energy beams licked out at her and off into the sky. Natalya realized that she was using the sword only as a distraction, to engage as many troops as possible, drawing their attention away from the innocents. She would reach a critical mass of adversaries, though, and an energy weapon would find its target, and tiny Fei Li would die.
Molotok zoomed from one trooper to another, his terrible strength allowing him to at least uproot the giants before they could slay more civilians.
That was all she saw in the brief moment of respite before the five troopers reoriented on her. Desperate for an escape route, the crowd had followed the militsya’s commands towards Saviour’s Gate, clearing spaces in the square like ripples from thrown pebbles in a pond. The troopers didn’t track the fleeing protesters: she had succeeded in her immediate goal, to her own great peril.
Energy weapons had eaten away at the fringes of the crowd, creating a wall of bodies five or six deep. Natalya looked for CCCP where the Nazis had clustered. Her strategy had worked too well: the troopers had closed in on individual metas.
The mortar they’d spotted had fired, its report unheard in the chaos. A wicked yellow cloud formed over the crowd massing at Saviour’s Gate, stinking of rotten garlic. The wind died just as the plume began to descend onto the square.
She’d only read about the smell of nerve gas. Yet she knew at once what it was. Their efforts to protect the civilians had only delayed their deaths.
The square grew silent all at once, as the troopers waited for the gas to descend, unafraid in their sealed suits. The exhausted CCCP metas stared at the cloud in helplessness. Upturned faces of protesters watched death fall upon them.
She gasped with the inspiration. She looked frantically for Petrograd. His perpetually aloft silver form had come to a halt above a squad of troopers.
“Petrograd!” Her voice seemed tiny in the silent square. “Petro!”
He turned his dented helmet head towards her.
“Mach one!” she called to him, pointing to the cloud. “Now!”
Petrograd’s armor had been optimized for supersonic flight, but he needed to build up momentum to achieve those speeds. He hesitated; they both knew the limits of his rocket pack. Then, with a crisp salute, he launched into the sky on a plume of exhaust. He banked hard over the Kremlin, trailing white smoke. Flames spat from his rocket pack. Angling upwards, his form shrank to a speck then grew in size as he strafed the cloud of nerve gas.
A sonic boom could exceed one hundred pounds per square-foot pressure, the equivalent of a sonic vacuum cleaner. Petrograd burned hotter and brighter as he blasted across the square. He was gone in the blink of an eye, too fast for the Nazis to fire upon. The nerve gas followed him up into the atmosphere, dispersing in the sonic boom that battered their ears. It was the loudest sound Red Saviour had ever heard, and it swallowed the lesser sound of Petrograd’s rocket pack exploding and burning him alive. Black debris fell at the end of his vapor trail. She bit back the wail of grief inside her.
A moment passed as the crowd digested what had happened, then a single cry of relief swelled into a chorus, then an uproar. Supernaut took the moment to unleash his fire. It heated their armor bright red. The asphalt puddled around their feet. But a stray bullet from a rifle—could it have been Korovin’s?—struck the shoulder of a Nazi; he flinched and blood spurted from the wound.
Supernaut had exposed the Nazi armor’s weakness.
“Comrades!” She rose into the sky. “Comrades! We won’t run any more. Burn these fashistas out of the Motherland!” She pointed at Supernaut. “Vassily! You want to lead? Start now! Melt their armor!”
Supernaut loosened the nozzles on his backup tanks. Flames billowed out from his gloves, his arms, in wide tongues of fire, shaping his wild outpouring into a curving bank of fire that cut the Nazis off from the crowd.
“Spread it out!” Red Saviour flew near them. The heat from the wall brought sweat out on her forehead.
Bleeding from a dozen wounds, Svetoch stepped up next to the two flamethrowers. He, too, could ignite materials at a thought, and he added burning asphalt to the wall of fire. The flames licked twenty feet into the air.
The CCCP regrouped, those that remained: Worker’s Champion, his dress suit in tatters; Molotok, breathing hard; People’s Blade, her serenity replaced by cold determination; Soviet Bear and Soviette; Chug, his stone face a mask of childlike rage.
The metas seemed dispirited, shoulders hunching forward, steeling themselves for another attack on the Nazi horde. The roaring wall of fire painted their faces orange like a Dark Ages fresco of Hell.
“We must evacuate these people,” Worker’s Champion said with a tone that brooked no argument. “There is little time before the next wave.”
“Nyet,” Natalya heard herself tell the greatest meta the Russian people had ever produced, and then she knew why. “Nyet, Comrade Boryets, because we are the next wave. The fire weakens their armor enough for us to defeat them. This we must do.”
Worker’s Champion drew himself up. “And what about the civilians, Natalya Nikolaevna?”
“They are not civilians.” She turned to face the crowd waiting to see what their protectors would do to save them. “They are my army.” She expended some energy to hover before the onlookers.
“Tovarischii,” she declared. “These fashistas think they can herd Russians like sheep. Have they not forgotten what we taught them before? That Russians are wolves!” Energy coruscated around her upraised fists. “They think they can use you as bait to separate us and kill us one at a time. Instead, we’ll show them the collective strength of the Russian people!”
Director Korovin, bleeding from the forehead, stepped forward with the antique rifle. “Tell us what to do, Commissar.”
Natalya showed them her teeth in a feral grin. “Find a weapon. We’re going to mix our spilled blood with some of theirs. These flames soften their armor.”
“For Mother Russia!” someone in the crowd cried out. The words spread through the crowd as fists pumped the air, many holding pieces of rubble or metal pipes. Protest signs with her name had been reduced to clubs. Outrage and anger had replaced the panic in their eyes.
She surveyed the crowd of pale Russian faces, intermixed with tourists of all nationalities. The face of international brotherhood, she thought, but only when we come under attack does it show.
Red Saviour rewarded Worker’s Champion’s glare with a smile tinged with madness. She took up the chant with the crowd: “For Mother Russia!” Then she flew close to the trio of flamethrowing metas.
“Push that wall out through their ranks. Give them a taste of the flames of revolution.”
“Ha!” Supernaut wagged his helmeted head in exaggerated bravado. “You heard our Commissar, comrades. Follow me!”
Nazi troopers cringed as the flames heated their armor to a crimson glow.
“Forward the proletariat!” Red Saviour bellowed. She let loose a blast of energy at the first trooper revealed; the energy exploded in a splash around him. Armor shards flensed off the Nazis.
The crowd roared and surged forward. They hurled rocks, fired recovered police firearms, and screamed for blood. The CCCP metas dashed ahead of them, combining their attacks on the troopers. The flame and the charge took the Nazis by surprise. A pitiful handful of energy bolts shot out, missing metas and civilians wildly.
People’s Blade propelled herself through the air, her ancient blade, Jade Emperor’s Whisper, held behind her shoulder blades in both hands. Using her momentum, she swung in a vicious arc at the head of a red-hot Nazi trooper. The blade sliced through overheated metal, flesh and bone. His head toppled to the ground and bounced with a hollow sound.
“They bleed like any man!” she cried in accented Russian.
The troopers’ hesitation ended. They were vulnerable at last. The next volley of energy bolts found their marks, and dozens of protesters screamed in furious agony. The bolts cut a swath through the crowd, yet they stepped over their fallen neighbors, stopping only to pick up more rocks.
Red Saviour’s army of the people advanced on their enemies.
Atlanta, Georgia, USA: Callsign Red Djinni
What a day.
Unlikely events bordering on divine intervention, befuddled by a sudden, creepy reawakening of morality, and now betrayed by the crew who had watched my back for five years. The booming thunder from Jack’s greased pistols was a wake-up call. I felt the barrage pound into me and the steel shelves of the strong room bite into my back. I clutched at my chest and toppled forward. A curtain of red and black pain hazed everything.
Jack turned away. Was he in such a rush to book? Enough to walk away without even checking for a pulse? Or did he just trust that sixteen bullets finding their mark in a man’s chest was a pretty conclusive end? In either case, he was on the move and I was dead to him.
Get up, Red. It can’t end like this, it can’t…
The blood was flowing, I knew it, just as I knew I could fix it. I had kept a secret from all of them, and it was that I could fix this; I just needed to get past the pain. I could barely move, I could barely think, and I needed to concentrate, to fix this…
Startled yells came from a distance. I heard Jack in there, shouting a warning. And another voice. A female voice. A familiar voice. A voice that had once purred in my ear all the love one man could stand. My wounds forgotten, I strained to listen and to slowly crawl through a pool of my own blood to the door, to see what was going on.
“We don’t have time for this! I don’t care if they’re Echo metas, take them!”
“Captain, we can take them! We need to reach the armory and get back out there! The people…!”
“Get that gun out of my face, asshat! Didn’t you hear that? They’re right behind us!”
“It’s four on three, Jack! And they’ve got that goddamned Echo armor…”
“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! None of this matters right now! They’re coming down here and they’re going to kill us all!”
I managed to peek out the door, and for a moment the pain went away, replaced by shock. A group of Echo operatives, OpOnes by the look of them. And in front, screaming at my crew, was Victoria Summers, callsign Amethist, Echo OpTwo. The same Echo OpTwo we had run into last time in Atlanta.
It was a Mexican standoff. Everyone had their weapons trained on each other, shouting to be heard over the din. But over them all, Amethist commanded attention, and screamed the words that brought Jack, Jon and Duff to a puzzled halt. As for me, they were a painful reminder of the surreal, dreamlike quality of that day.
This day just can’t get any worse…
“Look, you morons, we’re under attack by Nazi metatroopers! We’re all under attack! You help us—help us help you—or we’re all dead!”
Okay, I stand corrected.
Jack hesitated, and that was all she needed: Amethist took control immediately, and commanded everyone to arm themselves from the weapons depot.
“Anything big and meaty that looks like it can punch through a tank! Grab it, arm it, aim it at the blast doors!”
Jack was done looking startled. He realized that Amethist had meant him, Jon and Duff as well. He signaled the others to follow her. Dumbly, Jon and Duff scrambled for what looked like high-tech rocket launchers.
The look on their faces…If I hadn’t been swimming in my own blood, I might have laughed.
They took a defensive position behind a short ledge, waist-high, lined with riot shields, and trained their hastily armed weapons at the tunnel.
“Where’s Red Djinni?” Amethist demanded.
“Dead,” Jack answered. “Back in the vault.”
Amethist just looked at him, started to say something, but her attention was drawn back to the tunnel. There came a steady thumping of steel slamming into stone, a march of metallic feet crashing down in unison. Whoever they were, I muttered a curse at them. If they hadn’t distracted her, Amethist might have looked back, might have seen me lying in the strong room, weakly waving at her.
She would have seen I was alive.
Would she have rushed to my side? I’d like to think so. I mean, it’d be dramatic. Our lives had gone in such different directions, it was sometimes hard to imagine us as those crazy kids. Still, there was a time when nothing could have kept us apart, when nothing else mattered.
Does that surprise you? Does it confuse you that I had a history with the OpTwo that had sent us scurrying into hiding a couple of years back? It shouldn’t. Like I said before, this was the worst day, ever. The love of your life always plays a pivotal role on your worst day.
“Fire!” Amethist bellowed.
As one, the seven defenders unleashed hell on the advancing troopers. Just moments before, they had been ready to kill each other. Now, they fought side by side against a metal-clad death squad.
Nothing like a Nazi invasion to bring people together.
And I, watching my world accelerate into a delirious cosmic opera of crazy, chuckled a maniacal laugh of confusion, continued to bleed, and felt myself black out.
* * *
How long I was out, I couldn’t really say. It couldn’t have been that long, but in those moments I saw my life—the parts I wanted to see.
I wanted to see Victoria.
Soft light streaming through white silk curtains, making her features burn as her eyes fluttered open, and her first smile of the day warming me with a fiery glee that I could feel creeping through my whole body. Despite how it ended, how she had left it, I chose to remember her that way.
Vic had grown up in Manhattan, in the small neighborhood known as Hell’s Kitchen. She was the youngest of three daughters of a simple shopkeeper and his wife. A bright, fair-skinned, blond beauty, she believed in the tired old ideals of justice and honor and was raised to believe that people, at their core, were good. She fought for the underdog, hated bullies, and had a pretty solid left hook to back that up.
Do you remember that July evening, years back, when a freak snowstorm ravaged the state of New York? That was the night we met. The coast took the brunt of the storm. It made my life pretty miserable, I can tell you. I was a street urchin at the time. No, seriously, I lived in alleys, on deserted rooftops and when the weather got cold, in steam tunnels. Those days, I always wore the mask. My control over my skin was, shall we say, lacking finesse? Still a teenager, I was constantly fighting growth spurts and the mask would hide the ropes of skin that would sometimes erupt from my head. To survive, I had made theft my trade and the compact urban jungle of Manhattan my routes of escape. Up to that point, I had kept it simple and stole from unattended homes or small-time stores with no security. But that night I was caught in the sudden turn of weather. I was without shelter, in nothing but my mask, worn cut-off jeans and a ragged shirt, and I was freezing to death. So I tried to mug someone.
Vic had been walking home late from a jazz competition. In the open solo competition, her saxophone set had landed her second place. She had shown up her critics, the ones who had beaten her down with their caustic comments for months. That night, she had stepped away from the musical theory, from the tightly regimented rehearsals, and had just bared her soul for all to hear. She felt wonderful, and despite the cold, she felt truly warm and alive. Part of that, I’m sure, was from the thick parka she was wearing. And for a young, freezing and desperate Red Djinni, that parka offered a warmth that was impossible to resist.
I had never tried to mug anyone before. This was made painfully obvious from my awkward efforts to drag her into an alley. The girl didn’t even have the decency to be scared. She shrieked insults at me, which led to a pretty childish argument. Hey, we were kids. By the end, I remember letting my claws extend in disgust tinged with petulant anger. Her eyes grew wide, at first with astonishment and, finally, registering some fear. And then, inspired by true stupidity, I demanded she hand over the saxophone too. Her eyes narrowed into feral slits. There was just no way, not that night. She began pelting me with ice. That confused the hell out of me. I didn’t know where she was getting this ice. Jagged chunks of it just seemed to appear in her hands.
That was the night Vic Summers discovered her own metapowers, which she used to make Red Djinni scream like a little girl while running for his life.
By our next meeting, I had made a name for myself as a ghost, a spook of the neighborhood. The soiled red scarf I always wore as a mask had branded me for life. “Get in before dark!” mothers would lecture their children, “or the Red Djinni will getcha!” My game had improved. I had learned to control my skin, to hug the shadows and to dance across rooftops in nightly raids. Doors that had seemed impenetrable before began opening up to me. That was the night of my first big job, a local club on the cusp of a successful run. The plan was simple, but it was the scariest thing I had ever tried. Grab the money as Red Djinni, disappear into the crowd and leave.
That was also the night that a new, cold-powered meta named Amethist made her debut in Hell’s Kitchen. I’ll spare myself the more embarrassing details, and just say that the job was a major flop. I didn’t get the money. I didn’t even make it into the club. That night, all I got for my troubles was a clumsy escape, a new nemesis and a mild case of hypothermia.
The next couple of years started out rough. Amethist was everywhere. I couldn’t pull even simple jobs without her lurking about. We did the dance, had any number of street fights, complete with premeditated insults and witty remarks, and continued to be thorns in each other’s paws.
But after a while it became…fun.
We fought constantly, but I never beat her in a straight fight and she never managed to capture me. The dance continued, and I couldn’t have asked for a better partner.
I don’t think either of us wanted a clear victory. We wouldn’t admit it, but we defined each other. We needed each other, each forcing the other to be faster, smarter, tougher, to be better. I learned so much from sparring with her—how to fight, how to plan and how to judge your opponents.
That was an important lesson. Know everyone. Be they your enemies, your friends or your victims, you controlled your destiny by predicting the greatest variable there was—the actions of people. After a few tussles with Vic, I had made it my job to read people, to get under their skin. If I couldn’t deal with her in a straight fight, I figured I could get to her another way—by understanding her drive, by observing those she cared about, all to predict her actions, her reactions, and ultimately, her.
This accomplished two things.
First, I learned how to generalize people, classify them, and imitate them. I learned how to read people as open books.
Second, I came to the startling conclusion that I was in love with Amethist.
I hadn’t seen that coming. I should have. Did I mention she was beautiful? Well, it turned out it wasn’t skin deep. This girl was beautiful. She always fell for my traps, each one, and why? Because I put people in danger and she couldn’t let people get hurt, even if she knew it was just a diversion so I could pull some fast job on the other end of the city. And every time she saved them, every time. A few times she even managed to catch up with me to foil whatever petty job I had planned. And she did all that because it was the right thing to do. How do you not fall in love with someone like that?
And even after all my careful planning, my vigilant observations of her, there was still a lot I couldn’t figure out. I did my homework. I learned her secret identity. That Amethist was a poor Kitchen girl named Victoria Summers only deepened what love I had for her. She had these remarkable abilities, and she didn’t use them for herself, or even to give her family a better life! She used them for any poor Joe who was victim to jerks like me.
But the greatest mystery was about her feelings for me. Somewhere, somehow as our paths continued to bump and bang against one another, she had fallen in love with a jackass like me. She told me later that she’d known, from the first night we met, that I wasn’t hopeless. She said she knew there was something in me worth her effort and patience.
That did it. It had been so long since I’d heard anyone say those words to me.
“I believe in you, Red.”
So I tried it. I tried being like her, a hero. I ran with Amethist for months, and we stopped some pretty sick individuals. Before long, I had bared my soul to her. In return, she told me things that made me marvel at her curiosity, at her naïvety. How did someone who faced the worst of humanity stay this unblemished, this pristine, even after all the horrors she had witnessed? I didn’t know, or care. I just wanted to protect that innocence, to protect her. I had to laugh at myself. The plan had backfired. Learn to read people, predict what they’ll do and they’re yours, right? Funny how that works out. When you draw someone close like that, you forget that it’s a two-way street. As you’re digging around inside them, they’re sinking their claws inside you.
By the fall of 1991, six months after we had confessed our love for each other, she wanted out.
No. I don’t want to see this. Please…
She had tried to talk herself into staying, because she did love me. I knew that. But it wasn’t enough, and in the end I couldn’t be the hero she needed me to be. There were extremes that I would go to, to fight the bastards that ran organized crime. And I’m not talking about bravery. I’m talking about brutality. We had been fighting a losing war with the local mobs. Anytime we felt we were close to busting them, to exposing them, someone we needed would die. An informant, or a witness, the mob saw them dead by morning. I was determined to stop it. So I targeted the bosses. I made their lives hell. When that didn’t work, I resorted to beating them senseless. In a few cases, I overdid it a little. The last boss I killed, Vic caught me in the act. It didn’t matter that he had committed murders a hundred times worse. When Vic walked in on that, she saw me as one of them. A murderer. She was scared of me.
No…no…
But leaving me was complicated. We were expecting, the two of us. We had just learned of it. A child. Our child. But on that day, she came to me, deathly pale, and told me she couldn’t do it. She knew how I felt, that I would never consent, could never stay away from my own child, and so she had made the decision alone. The abortion clinic…
That’s ENOUGH!
Enough? No, not enough. Not nearly enough. I still blamed her, a big part of me hated her, wanted to hurt her. You see it, Red? You see what you did? You did it. Everything you tried to protect her from, you did it to her yourself.
Now go tell her, and pray it isn’t too late.
* * *
Amidst shouts and the exchange of energy blasts and explosions, I came to. Rolling over, I looked down and saw the riddled holes in my chest and the blood seeping out. But Jack’s bullets, designed to puncture skin and tear through flesh, hadn’t quite done their job. Like I said, I’d kept it secret even from my team. My skin wasn’t just skin-deep. It made sense to wear a bulletproof vest, sure. But Jack and the rest knew that I wouldn’t, because I needed my skin under no more than, say, a shirt, to use my extra senses. So I pulled a trick they never suspected: I grew my body armor under my skin.
Out of some deep reservoir I didn’t know I had, I shoved the pain aside, concentrated, focused in a way I had only tried once or twice and with an intensity I’d never felt before. Because this was new. While my skin had kept the entry wounds shallow, I was still in real danger from bleeding out.
I started growing the tissue that would push the bullets out ahead of it. Skin, but…well it was my skin. My skin, whatever the hell it is. I stopped bleeding, and one by one, sixteen bullets squeezed out of my torso like a kid popping zits, to clatter down onto the concrete. All the while, out there, explosions, the whine of energy weapons, screaming and shouting and cursing, the metallic taste of blood and the smell of hot metal and burning plastic.
I lay there for just a second. I was tired in a way you just can’t imagine, but I didn’t have time to be tired. You can rest when you’re dead. Oh. Too late. Out there the woman I had loved, the woman I still loved, was fighting for her life. I knew it had to be that dire, or she would never, ever have joined forces with my crew.
I grabbed the first thing that looked big, mean, and nasty, flipped a switch on the butt of it, and as it powered up, dashed out the door to throw myself down between Vic and Jack behind what was left of the barrier.
“We gotta stop meetin’ like this, darlin’,” I said, as Vic’s eyes jerked over to her right, saw me, widened with shock, and then went alight with joy. Even now I couldn’t resist a smart-ass quip.
Jack’s eyes flickered to me, and back to the fight. “I should have known,” he muttered.
Everyone you ask is going to tell you that they just weren’t prepared for their first sight of those Nazi armored troopers. Everyone is right. Nothing could have prepared us for this: Hitler’s wet dream. Serious. Everything that crazed housepainter could have thought up, everything any of his mad scientists could have thought up, all packaged into chromed and enameled, unstoppable, death machines. Now, after terrabytes of video and millions of photographs, hours of analysis and a phalanx of Eminent Experts, people are used to seeing them. But that first sight? It was more than a jolt to the gut. It was a kidney punch, a brick to the head and a karate kick to the face, all at once.
This is Evil and it has come to kill us all.
And damned if I was going to let it.
I aimed whatever it was that I was carrying at the Nazis, and pulled the trigger.
And nothing happened. I mean, it made a whoompf noise like a dragon farting—and yeah, I do know what that sounds like—but that was about it.
I cursed and was about to throw it away, when my skin told me that whatever my eyes said, there was something going on. Something…building. Pressure. There was a pressure wave, out in front of us. And the Nazis started to take a step.
And couldn’t.
It was like an obscene version of a street mime in the classic “walking against the wind.” They tried to move, and it was in slow motion, shoving against something, a wind that wasn’t there. They even leaned into it, as Vic and the rest sent a hell of incendiary and explosive rockets into their midst.
But my toy was only slowing them down. It wasn’t doing a thing about their arm cannons. And they let loose with those, forcing us to duck behind an increasingly smaller barrier, forcing me to move my gun out of harm’s way,
They got Duff; he was just a fraction of a second too late. One of the energy blasts took his head right off, vaporized it, and the headless body flopped down next to Jon.
I tried to get Vic’s attention, then—this might be the last time, the only time I’d be able to tell her how sorry I was, how sorry for everything, but there wasn’t any time, and she couldn’t have heard me over the blasts, the scream of the energy cannons, and Jon’s stream of curses.
We weren’t stopping them. We could slow them, but we couldn’t stop them. And if they hadn’t known about the Vault before, if they had only followed Vic and her crew in by accident, they surely knew what it was by now. They’d have everything that was in the Vault, of which the Inferno was only one part, and probably not even the most important.
The Inferno—
That was when I knew, I knew that the Inferno bomb was the key. We needed to let them in, let them past us, and blow the Vault with the Inferno—
I made a dive for Duff’s body, scrambling through his clothing, his pockets, trying to find the damn thing. My hand felt it in his vest and I looked up to see every Nazi trooper had his energy cannon trained on me. They’d blasted away the last of the barrier over Duff’s body, and now I was in the open. I heard the whine as the weapons all ramped up.
My skin wasn’t going to stop that.
You know how they say, in moments like this, everything moves in slow motion? It does. Just like some cheesy special effect—I watched as Vic launched herself at me. I felt myself falling over as she hit me. I slid sideways, behind more of the barrier, out of harm’s way.
I watched her glow white, then vanish in the crossfire of a dozen energy beams, taking the blasts meant for me.
The world stopped. She was gone. Forty-five heists, thirty-two meaningless trysts, six Nazi troopers and fifteen years too late, I had finally found peace with us, but I would never get to tell her. I would never get to hold her again, or see that winsome smile meant just for me. All the good that was Victoria Summers was gone in a flash of light, and my world crumbled in the wake of that blast.
I lost it.
I didn’t care anymore. I know I must have been screaming something, and it must have been coherent, because Jack, Jon, and the three OpOnes went wide and around, letting the troopers shoot their way past us and into the Vault itself, dodging blasts as they ran. I screamed at them, taunting them, moving, always moving, getting them to chase me deeper in. I saw Jon go down, then two of the OpOnes. I didn’t care. All I cared about was living long enough, just long enough, to take those bastards out. Once they were well into the Vault, I turned and dove for the tunnel, somersaulting and rolling, coming to my feet and dropping the Inferno to the ground.
Jack and the last OpOne and I ran up the tunnel, through the delivery bay and made for the outside. The troopers were a lot slower. They turned as one, and started their slow march toward us. And I waited until they were right on top of that bomb.
“Ignition!” I screamed. And I hit the remote trigger and turned to watch as the other two hit the dirt.
They were right to call it “Inferno.” The Vault glowed a magnesium-flare white. The columns holding up the ceiling collapsed, and the whole building above fell down, down onto the troopers. An enormous cloud of rubble spewed out of the tunnel doors, slamming into us, throwing us back to land in battered heaps on the ground.
I blacked out again.
It couldn’t have been long.
When I came to, and crawled to my feet, the only sounds were the ticking bits of falling rubble, explosions in the far distance, and Jack’s feet hitting the pavement as he booked out of there.
Vic’s last OpOne and I stared at each other through the settling dust. I could tell what was on his mind. This was the infamous Red Djinni. And any other day, if I hadn’t been on the Ten Most Wanted List before, after blowing into the Vault I would have been.
On the other hand, compared to what had been in here with us, and what was plainly still out there now, I was a pretty pitiful minnow among the piranha. The world as we both knew it had just done a complete one-eighty. And I knew what Vic would have done…would have asked me to do.
“Look,” I said hoarsely. “Let me help you save whoever we can. Arrest me after. Okay?”
Wordlessly, he nodded, got to his feet, and offered me a hand up.