The Other Eight, page 20
“I must say,” Dr. Aiken said. “The bottom eight are making a strong showing. Inventive uses of their abilities. I don’t know which of them is carrying the flag, but if they would get up to that pole, they might win this thing.”
“As much of a fiasco as this has been so far, there is definitely some military promise here, if applied correctly. It looks like they were marching the soldiers out of the facility. Clever way to even the odds,” General Siegel growled, as though the act of speaking the grudging compliment caused him physical pain. “Damn good thing we’re far enough away from that dancer to avoid his powers.”
The clicking of the van door drew their attention. Major St. John stepped out.
“Are you sure you don’t want to stick around for this? It looks like the end is in sight,” Aiken said.
“Oh, I know it. I’ve got to make some calls, see what our ratings peak is, and see if we can get the moment of the finish covered on local news. I’ll be back,” he said, ducking out the door.
#
Gracias and Chloroplast just made it down the stairs and sprinted around a blind corner when they both collided with a hulking form. The heroes went tumbling to the ground, all three guns skittering down the hallway. Gracias’s head hit the wall hard, dislodging his headset and smashing it on the floor. Instantly he began to shudder and lurch to the music, strutting back toward the door. Chloroplast recovered, headset intact. Also recovering from the collision was Johnny On the Spot.
“Of course you’d coincidentally be wearing hearing protection when the music started,” Chloroplast groaned.
“What? I can’t hear you, I’ve got earplugs in!” he bellowed. “I saw Hocker dancing toward the door so I put some on him, too. Do you know where the utility room is? He said something about finding the music and shutting it—”
Chloroplast heaved his shoulder into Johnny On the Spot and knocked him back into the wall, then keyed his radio. “Gracias is out, and JOTS and Hocker are back in the game. I’ll take care of Johnny, but Hocker might be heading your way!” Johnny On the Spot recovered, and seemed to finally realize that Chloroplast wasn’t on his team. Chloroplast tightened his fists. “Come on, you lucky SOB, let’s see what you’ve got.”
#
“Roger that,” Nonsensica replied.
The combination lock had proven sturdier than the paintball guns. Bashing at it with the weapons had done some damage to it, but now all three guns were broken beyond usefulness. Phosphor put his boot to the door, and began making good progress. The hinges looked about to give way when Non Sequitur called out over the radio.
“Phosphor, Hocker to your right!”
Phosphor dodged aside just in time to avoid a spray of paintballs. Nonsensica launched herself after the seed-spitting soldier and managed to stagger him with two punches and a kick. She delivered another kick that knocked the weapon free, and tried to land a knockout blow when he puckered his lips.
“Hit the deck!” she squealed, dropping down.
He must have had a mouthful of seeds, because what came from his mouth was like the blast of a shotgun, tearing through the remains of the door—and likely Phosphor as well if not for the warning.
“What the hell! Are you insane! This is a war game!” Nonsensica cried, though even if Hocker had been able to hear her, judging from the look on his face he was in no state to listen.
No logic lingered behind his eyes anymore. Some men experience something akin to battle and it brings them back to all of the past conflicts they’ve had to survive. They crumble, or perhaps revert to some sort of survival-at-any-cost mindset. Anything to get out of the fight alive. Hocker seemed to be on the other side of the equation, a man who has been holding an unlit stick of dynamite for his whole life just waiting for someone to hand him a match. Now that the lines of us and them had finally been drawn, any concept of restraint had gone out the window.
“I’ll deal with him. Go!” Nonsensica announced, drawing her non-chucks and getting between Hocker and the others.
Rather than waste breath arguing, Phosphor simply announced, “Win fast, or else I’ll be back to show you how it’s done, young lady.”
With that, Phosphor and Non Sequitur hurried through the ruined door. Nonsensica spun her weapons defensively.
“Okay… he’s not dancing, which means he’s got earplugs in. That means my powers are useless…” she grinned. “Guess I’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way.”
She sprinted at him, flailing her weapons. He cupped a sweaty palm to his mouth, quickly reloading with a handful of seeds. Hocker wasn’t an artful fighter, but he had a massive height and weight advantage, and all he had to do was point his mouth in her direction to score a finishing blow. Nonsensica’s only defense was agility, but she used it well. A blur, she darted to and fro, raining blows down on him from every angle and diving aside as his face turned to fire a lethal seed. Shots to the kidneys and knees staggered him, but his heavy swinging arm managed to clip her. Even the grazing blow was more than enough to spin her aside and smash her face-first into the wall of the narrow corridor. He drew in a sharp breath, mouth pointed squarely at his temporarily dizzied target. At the last instant she raised her leg and thrust a kick at the wall, forcing herself backward with all of her might and allowing her to drive her elbow into his midsection. The strike forced the air from his lungs and delivered the deadly payload of seeds in a monumental blast that gouged a deep divot out of the cinder-block wall. Before he could recover, she backed away, jumped again to the wall, and sprang off of it, using height and force to deliver a punishing knee to his chin. He hit the ground like a sack of potatoes.
“Let’s see you make sense of that!” she said. She replayed the line in her head, testing it for the proper level of heroism. “Eh. Still needs work.” She tapped her radio. “Hocker is down. I’m going to see if Chloroplast needs a hand. Or a foot.”
#
Beyond the broken door extended another hallway, the beginning of what looked to be an entirely separate training setting. It was long and separated into dozens of little shelf-lined nooks like the stacks of a library or an old archive. Whatever it was meant to be, it had a lot of crannies to search. Whereas narrowing the location of the bomb down to half of a floor seemed fairly precise before, now they were wishing that Bomb Sniffer was still on the team.
“Roger, Nonsensica. Keep us posted,” Non Sequitur said in reply to his teammate’s report.
“There,” said Phosphor, “a closed door. That must be it.”
The two rushed over to the door. If the rest of the unusual hall resembled part of a library, this must have been one of the reading rooms. It had a burnt-out overhead lamp, a few chairs, a table, and a suspicious blinking light glowing in the shadow beneath. The door was locked, but unlike the outer door, it was just a knob lock. One application of Non Sequitur’s powers later and the door opened, unleashing a wave of diesel fumes that they didn’t need superpowers to detect. Phosphor revealed and lit a bulb, setting it down. He breathed in a shaky breath and let it out again.
“Okay. A bomb,” he said.
Underneath the table were what looked like eight or nine 100-pound sacks of concrete mix, except that they were in white plastic and covered with bright red warnings about their explosive content. On top of the nearest sat an unassuming black box with a rubber-coated antenna sticking out of the top and a few blue shrink-wrapped cylinders set into the face. A pair of wires stuck out of the side of the box and connected to the top of what looked like a silver mechanical pencil that had been jabbed into the bag of explosive.
“An ANFO bomb,” Non Sequitur added, as though it would help.
“Right. These soggy bags are probably the ANFO, which would mean that this blinking gadget here is the thing that blows it up.”
“The detonator. I’d really feel better about this if you used the proper terminology.”
“I’m a maintenance man, not a bomb technician. I’m going to call it the blinking gadget. If you don’t like that, you can do this yourself.”
“Fine, fine, get on with it.”
“Good. So this bit here looks like an antenna, which means they are probably right about them setting it off from someplace else. No timer. This part here looks like a battery. And this part here looks like it pokes down into the bag. Nothing too complicated. Probably we can just pull this out.”
“What if it has countermeasures to keep us from defusing it.”
“Then we’re about to blow up, which is what was going to happen anyway, so may as well give it a yank.”
“But maybe we should—”
With a deft motion, Phosphor tugged the “blinking gadget” off the “soggy bag.” After three or four seconds without a kaboom, they both started breathing again.
“See. Like pulling off a Band-Aid,” Phosphor said, slowly swapping the gadget to the other hand to get it away from the explosive. He’d barely finished doing so when there was a beep and a pop, and a brief spray of sparks came out of the end of the detonator.
When the spray finished and there still wasn’t a kaboom, their hearts started beating again.
“Cut that a bit close,” Phosphor said.
#
Outside, the dance duel raged on, with Primadonna and her dancers facing the gate, The Number and his crew facing the fort. Among the legion of soldiers torn between the two musical puppeteers were FM, Undo, Omnivox, Third Person, and Retcon. Gracias and Bomb Sniffer had now been swept up in the dance royale as well. The dancers were evenly split, and those controlling them had ceased to take turns. Now they were face to face, almost nose to nose, dancing furiously with their moves mirroring those of the other. It was all about skill now, technique. They had been at it for more than three minutes. Gradually the dancers turned, sliding to The Number’s side until only Primadonna herself faced the gate. Then, her face a mask of panic and fury, she began to turn. Marching with rhythmic steps, she moved beside The Number… and joined his routine. After a few triumphant steps and turns, The Number pivoted his dancers and marched them quickly outside, slapping the gate-close switch as he went.
Not a moment too soon the gate locked shut behind them. A few seconds later, the music ended. Bomb Sniffer and Gracias, either by design or dumb luck, had been positioned directly behind Undo, Retcon, and the others. Before they could turn, the Red Team was treated to a few point-blank paintball shots. There was another quick flurry of shots as the remaining soldiers who had not been shot tried to take out the remainder of the heroes. When the paint had settled, only The Number and Primadonna remained unscathed. They stood face-to-face, eyeing each other viciously.
“You… you wretched… you terrible… you….” Primadonna fumed. “You magnificent bastard!”
She seized his head tightly in her hands launched into an aggressive and severe series of kisses, eventually knocking both of them to the ground, where the festivities continued. Gracias looked down at them.
“Take it easy, you two. We’re on TV,” he said.
“Fine, you may have locked us out and gunned us down, but we’ve still got Hocker and Johnny On the Spot in there,” said Retcon.
“And we’ve got Nonsensica, Non Sequitur, Chloroplast, and Phosphor,” said Bomb Sniffer.
“So it is a geezer, a plant man, a shrimpy girl, and the one guy who didn’t want to be here versus a gambler’s dream and a human cannon. I like our odds,” Retcon said.
With nothing else to do at the facility, the soldiers and heroes decided to head for the edge of the training field, except for The Number and Primadonna, who were otherwise occupied. Gracias was the last to turn away from the spectacle and head for the perimeter.
“Man, I have got to learn how to dance…”
#
Erring on the side of caution, Phosphor and Non Sequitur decided it was best to move the detonator to an entirely different room just in case there was some sort of backup charge in it that would cause it (and them) to explode. Once it was stowed, they sprinted off toward their allies back in the main basement of the facility. They made it to the ruined door to find… nothing. There were a few notable divots gouged out of the walls by misfired sunflower seeds, but no Nonsensica and no Hocker.
“Nonsensica,” Non Sequitur said over the radio.
No reply.
“Chloroplast, answer,” he said. Still no reply. The silence was eerie, unnatural and complete. It took a moment before he realized that the reason the silence was so complete was that the music had stopped, and he hadn’t removed the sound-canceling headset. He pulled it free and turned to suggest Phosphor do the same when there came an intense, white-hot pain in his side, and the world dropped away.
Possibly minutes, possibly hours later, he woke to a horribly familiar scent. ANFO. He opened his eyes and tried to focus without much success. He was back in the bomb room.
“Well, look at that, I would have bet a thousand dollars Mr. Sapp would have woken up first.”
Non Sequitur looked toward the voice, which was as familiar as the smell—but since it had never been in a position to blow him to pieces, it had failed to make the same impact. With a bit of effort he finally got his eyes to cooperate. Standing before him, with a gun in one hand and something quite like the detonator in the other, was Major St. John. He had a swollen cheek and the beginnings of a black eye.
“Mr. Sapp—that’s Chloroplast by the way, I don’t know if you’ve been formally introduced—scored so high on the endurance tests I thought for sure he’d wake up first. Bravo!”
Non Sequitur surveyed the rest of the room. It was really rather crowded. Piled against one wall, one on top of the other, were Johnny On the Spot, Hocker, and Chloroplast. Each of them had their hands and legs restrained with zip ties. From the feel of it, the same thing restrained his own hands, and his legs were secured to the chair with two more. The bomb still held a commanding presence in the room, and to his right between himself and the door sat Nonsensica. She was awake, similarly restrained, and with a piece of duct tape over her mouth. Her eyes were filled with a mixture of fear and anger.
“You? How did you get in here?”
“They’ve got this place set up for both aboveground and belowground battles. These halls lead all the way out to the other side of the field.”
“You did all of this?”
“Yes. Well, not quite. I’m not done yet. There’s still the backup detonator to apply. I’ve got to tell you, this did not go as I’d intended. I don’t know if it will have quite the impact I was hoping for, but I’m sure we can work the drama angle to gain back in human interest what we lost in scale. You see, the plan was to blow the whole training ground with all of you in it. The winners, the losers, the troops, the cameramen. Everybody. It was going to happen on live television and streaming across the web. Seen by millions simultaneously. It would have been glorious. I suppose I got greedy though. Those rating numbers and website hits just kept creeping up. That dance routine? Huge hit! It was going viral before it was even over. But then I realized you were dancing them out of the facility, and if you got too many of them too far away then there would be survivors. Couldn’t have that. And then I realized that a whole batch of you weren’t on camera anymore. At that point I wasn’t terribly surprised when pushing the big red button didn’t do anything.”
“Maybe you should have put countermeasures on it.”
“I would have, but when the military trains you to wire detonators they teach you to make them safe, not volatile. At least, that’s the case with the training I got. On the plus side, they do teach you to build both remote detonators and these timer ones,” he said, waiving the new detonator. He leaned down and inserted it into the ANFO. “Ten minutes ought to be sufficient. Plenty of time for me to get out there and get an alibi.”
“Why? Why do any of this?”
“Do you really need to ask that? Look at you two! You aren’t proper superheroes. I should need something like an impossibly rare chunk of an extinct planet to take your powers away, not six inches of plastic, a piece of tape, and an off-the-shelf stun gun. By the way, did you know that trying to use a stun gun on a person in a latex suit doesn’t work very well? Hence the black eye. Had to use it twice on our flamboyant friend. The earplugs and such made it simple to sneak up and take each of you down otherwise. But I digress. A superhero, like every other part of the military, is a tool. Now a tool is a useful thing, no matter how crude, but the real step forward for humanity wasn’t when we started using tools. Do you see carpenters searching the forest for the perfect rock to use as a hammer? No. The real leap into the future happens when you start making tools. This recruitment and enlistment effort was doomed from the start. It taught us a few things, but those of us with any vision always knew that if we wanted a hero we could use, we were going to have to make it.”
“How?”
“The same way we do everything else in the military. Money. We build a fire, and we shovel government funding into it until we can pull what we need out of the ashes. And a superhero that laughs at bullets and lifts cars over his head, a real superhero? That takes more money than DARPA’s willing to part with. So we put this thing together. Get a real bunch of characters. Get the public invested in them. Then blow them up, live on TV. Pin it on a super villain. The public would demand a real defense against super villains, and the money would come pouring in. That’s why I didn’t want any of you to survive. People would want the survivors to be the heroes to defend them. I’ll have to figure out how to get rid of the rest of them later, I suppose.”
“So you were behind the fertilizer heist, and that detonator thing… but those aren’t bags of fertilizer. The army is bound to figure out it wasn’t those villains.”
“Of course they’ll know it wasn’t the villains. Do you realize the state of military forensics these days? They could take a swab from a bomb crater and tell you what chemical plant produced the fertilizer and on what day. And the amount they stole? Not nearly enough to do the job. Best to bring in the professional grade stuff. Tell me, did that Bomb Sniffer girl track it down for you? I thought ANFO wouldn’t have triggered her powers…”
