Blackjack Dead or Alive (The Blackjack Series Book 3) (19 page)

He was confused.

“I killed her friend,” I said.

“The guy you knocked off the building?”

I nodded and he waved me off, “Bro, she wasn’t into that dude anymore. She likes you. You fucked her, right?”

I shook my head, finishing the wine, and from his facial expression crushed his every dream.

“You serious?”

“Never happened,” I said. “Did Haha make it seem like we did?” I asked, suddenly concerned. There were plenty of times we were alone together and Haha could have snuck his cameras into our room and edited things to appear however he wanted.

“Haha?”

“The robot,” I said. “The show was put online by the stupid rabbit headed robot.”

“Ah,” he said. “Well, yeah, it kind of seemed like you two were doing it. At least you got some from Influx, right?”

Again, I crushed his hopes.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “After that first thing you went to jail, right? Then you were there for – what, two years?”

“Eighteen months,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t ask for details.

“So you haven’t been laid in more than two years?”

“What’s your concern with my-“

“Bro, we have to get you laid. You can’t go two years without anything. Your dick gets all blocked up.”

I laughed and got up, walking downstairs for more wine and food. Bubu followed.

“Look, I can talk to the ugly gypsy girl,” he said. “She’ll fuck you no problem.”

“Bubu, I’m good, okay?”

He followed quietly until we got to the kitchen.

“You gay,” he asked opening up a bottle, suddenly suspicious.

“No,” I said.

“Saving yourself for Apogee or some-“

“There was this girl,” I said. “After I got out of Utopia.”

“Ah,” he said, immediately relieved. “I mean, it’s cool if you’re…you know.”

I smiled, “I’m not.”

He drank from his wine, leaning against the kitchen sink. “Tell me about this girl, bro. I haven’t seen my wife in a few days. It’s starting to hurt.”

“Maybe I should send Lala to your room, huh,” I said, but he just took another long swig.

“Okay, the girl,” I said, taking more bread from a basket and chewing on the hard crusty stuff. “She was a villain,” I said, trying to recall the whole thing, and an image of Claire danced at the edges of my vision, her doe-like features, big green eyes, sublime eyebrows and long brown hair.

“We were under attack,” I said. “Dr. Zundergrub was coming after me. Remember Dr. Zundergrub from the show? Good, well, that guy broke into Utopia and killed a lot of people to get to me. I managed to get free thanks to a friend of mine…this guy called Black Razor…”

I realized I was rambling and paused for a breath.

“Sorry. Anyway, I got away from the doctor and ran into this villain called Lady Vexille. Know her? Yeah, didn’t figure you would. She’s an old timer.”

“Old chick?”

“Yeah,” I said, having a bit of fun at how horrified he was at the idea of me having sex with an older woman. “Hundreds of years old, but she looked like she was twenty.”

“Oh, like with her powers?”

I nodded, “Magic. She was very powerful and she got us out of there. We ended up in Australia. Her spell opened up a portal to the other side of the world, you see, and Utopia is…well, was, in the Atlantic. Deep down there. So for a few weeks we were stuck in Australia her and me.”

“Nice,” he said. “What did she look like?”

I described her.

“Tits?”

“Smallish,” I said, laughing. “The best part was that she could make anything we wanted, like food or whatever.”

“Bro…”

“What?”

“Marry her,” he said and we both broke into laughter. I could tell he was drunk and despite my metabolism, I was nurturing a healthy buzz. “She’s hot, immortal, and she can make your food and shit? Come on, have her make this castle and we can take a week off.”

“If she sounds pretty perfect, it’s because she kind of was,” I said.

He caught on quick, pointing his bottle at me, “She wasn’t perfect at all, huh?”

“Nope,” I said. “She was a vampire of sorts. She could suck the power out of me. That’s why she…”

I paused suddenly, a thought coalescing with an almost audible click. Before Utopia, before Australia, Apogee and I had come into contact with a Lightbringer. Alien and incomprehensible, the strange being had been composed of pure energy, and it was this energy that had given the Original Seven their powers. I had, in essence, gotten a double dose. It would explain why a vampire would be so attracted to me.

“Bro, you okay?”

“Yeah, just thinking.”

“She sucked your powers then?”

I nodded.

He laughed, “Reminds me of my wife.”

“She’s a six-hundred year old vampiric wizardess, too?”

“No way, man. She just…see, I know I’m cool and shit, but with her…I have no power.” He blinked, looking out into the far end of the room, as if she were standing right there. “Not in a bad way, bro. In the best way. You know what I mean?”

“I guess,” I said, finishing my second bottle and looking around for another.

He inched over to a chair and sat down, muttering something in Romanian. I found an unopened bottle and uncorked it, sitting across from him.

“To your wife,” I said, raising the bottle. He looked up at me for a second, but his eyelids were fluttering. He was slung against his wine, but his hands slid down and he cradled his head on the table.

I leaned back in the chair, listening to him breathing as he slept and thought of Apogee, wondering if this stupid plan of mine would work, if I would ever see her again.

I left him there and went upstairs, thoughts of Vexille and Apogee far from me as I looked at the whirlwind of papers spread around my room. I thought about tidying up a little, getting the different schematics in some kind of order, but I ignored them, falling into bed and closing my eyes. When they opened again, the sun was shining on my window, bright around the cracks in the drawn blinds.

A switch flipped in my brain and I hustled down the steps. I ignored the morning greetings from Lala and her kin, going through the open door to see a large cargo truck parked next to the one that housed Seven. Two thick set men were offloading boxes, while another stacked them neatly on the porch. Bubu was directing their efforts, while also talking to a thinner man who he seemed familiar with. The thin man saw me and pointed. Bubu nodded, speaking in Romanian and they shared a laugh.

“Bro, it’s all here,” Bubu said, as he came within whispering distance. “I need the money. I didn’t want to take it while you were sleeping.”

“Money clip’s on my night stand,” I said absently, my attention on the truck we owned. It was quiet; Seven’s persistent thrumming was missing. “Did you check?”

Bubu shook his head, “I wanted to, but it’s your baby. You get to see it first.” If he was hung over, it didn’t show as he trotted to the house, turning to say, “I started the Facebook account. You know how many Blackjack fan sites are out there? It’s crazy, bro.” He disappeared into the house, and I heard some talking from within. Onas and Vandilo appeared on the porch, and started moving boxes off the porch.

I wanted to climb into the truck and see what Seven had produced, but I also didn’t. It was Schrodinger’s cat. As long as I didn’t look in there, my plan was still alive and kicking. Seven worked as intended, and the next step in the process was waiting for assembly. If something had gone wrong, if my math had been bad or the printer built poorly, I was done. I didn’t have enough time or money to pull Seven apart, fix what was wrong and start over. My plan was both alive and dead. I still had hope.

Bubu’s men had stopped their work and were looking at me, smoking cigarettes. Cursing myself for a coward, I took the small metal ramp in two plodding steps and looked in the trays. Everything I needed was there, printed to perfection. Even within the solitude of the truck, I tried to suppress my joy, but failed. A weight I hadn’t even noticed lifted and underneath was pure, unfettered euphoria.

I jumped down from the truck and saw Bubu dishing out what looked like an enormous amount of money. He glanced my way and I nodded curtly. He took a small wad of cash and pushed it into the man’s hand, shook the other and shooed them back into their truck. It was polite, but insistent, and Bubu managed to be firm, while keeping the three men laughing the whole time.

The truck turned the corner away from our townhouse before Bubu ran past me into the back of the truck. He let out a whoop, and I joined him. He held out a hand and I shook it, my giant paw swallowing his. Without a word, he picked up frame pieces, stacking them by Seven as I checked the mixer levels and set the second to print. We carried the finished components inside and I got to work.

Cloistered in my lab, I didn’t see or talk to anyone for a long while. I responded to the occasional knock at the door, but didn’t register anything but the fuel presented to me. Time collapsed in on itself, the bright bulbs I screwed into the standing lamps, and the dark shaded windows rendering my circadian rhythms inert. The world ceased to exist but for the work, and it was simultaneously exhausting and calming.

Like yoga.

Bubu shattered the zen-like atmosphere of my monastery workshop, throwing the door open and rushing to me. “Bro!” he said, waving his hands to get my attention. I was deep in the bowels of the second big printer, re-cabling after a failed attempt. The machine still wasn’t working, and the first was too damned slow. Time was running out and it didn’t help that I was exhausted all the time, and my hands were aching. I fell asleep standing still, sometimes fading as I walked from one room to the next.

Judging by his wincing distaste, I didn’t look all that hot. He was bubbling over with whatever news he had, but just stared at me, almost in pity.

“What is it,” I reached for a cup of old coffee and wolfed it down.

“Damn, you need to get some sleep.”

“I just slept,” I went back into the machine, grabbing the cable spool and pulling a few loops out.

“No, you look sick, man. Like you’ve got a fever.”

I popped out, “Bubu, I don’t have time for this.”

“Well, you have to see this,” he said.

“What?”

“The Facebook account blew up. You’re maxed out of friend requests, but I left everything public like you asked, and there are thousands of fan messages, people talking about what you did in D.C., or bitching about how the government set you up. And you should see the pics man. Women are crazy for you.”

I slammed the side of the new machine, bending one of the metal struts.

“I don’t give a fuck about that, Bubu! Put all that shit on spam. I just want-“

“Why are you yelling at me?”

I tried to stand, but lost my balance and stumbled into the big table knocking it over, spilling a pile of tools, plans, and general trash onto the floor. Bubu rushed into help, but I steadied myself and threw a finger at him, halting his effort.

“I’m under the gun, goddammit. Don’t interrupt me if it’s not important.”

And nothing was as important as setting up the fortress. If I was found, right now, I had little fight in me. The fortress would add layers of defense between me and Haha. I needed time to build the sanctum, so I could have space to mend and rest.

“This is important, bro. Who’s Brutal?”

I picked up an overturned bottle of resin and capped it. “An old-school bad guy,” I said. “One of the worst, but Lord Mighty put him away a long time ago.”

“You sure he’s in jail?”

“He’s supposed to be,” I said, recalling that they had built a special prison for him, isolated in a remote part of the world. He was the last of the big villains put away pre-Utopia.

“He just sent you a video message,” Bubu said.

*              *              *              *

Brutal was staring back at me in a frozen frame on the screen as we settled into Bubu’s office, nestled in one of the guest rooms. My laptop computer was the mainframe, running the whole operation in a closed-circuit network. We weren’t even using wireless, with everything running on a cable and plug. I meant for things to go wireless once we were fully operational and had established our safety grid, but for now we were offline. Bubu had a separate laptop with a throwaway 3g connection and we were bouncing off repeaters whenever he went online to access the site. He’d connected this laptop to the system, and the video was queued to play.

Brutal was not a large man, with short black hair and dark brown eyes. His skin was pale, northern European and his black suit wasn’t ostentatious, probably something off the rack while still a classy modern cut. The only flair was a pair of colorful red and yellow striped socks that peeked under the hem of his pants as he crossed his leg, sitting comfortably on a red velvet loveseat. The lighting was dim, but that was his intention.

I was about to tell Bubu to hit play, when I saw the foot sway slightly and looking at the video’s time bar, I saw it had been playing for almost fifteen seconds of silence.

“Hi,” Brutal said with a higher pitched voice than you’d expect from one of the world’s most dangerous villains.

“I hear you have a hard on for me,” he said in an accent that was hard to place. One second it was Slavic and the other I thought it might be Irish.

Brutal reached over to an end table that was off screen and brought a florid drink into the view, some pink and peach concoction with an umbrella and two straws. He took a long sip and cradled the drink in both hands, fiddling with the straws.

Then he stared at the camera, almost motionless for another ten seconds.

“Why?” he said, flinching at his own question. His reactions were macro expressions, over emphasizing everything. “What did I do to you?”

“What the fuck is he talking about,” I asked Bubu, but he didn’t know either.

“I heard you got out and I thought, ‘Good’,” Brutal said. “I wished you well, you know?”

He took a sip and put the drink back, shaking his head distastefully at someone off camera, as if the drink wasn’t to his liking. Then he made a face at the camera, as if the viewer could empathize.

“Then I heard you were dead,” he said, shaking his head in wistful sadness. “I thought, ‘what a pity’, you know? ‘There goes one of the good ones,’ I said. Didn’t I say that?” he asked the person who had taken his drink and the fellow responded, but too low for the microphone to register more than a mumble.

“I was sad for you, Blackjack. Sad that you were gone. I mean if not for you, I’d still be…you know?” he smiled pointing back and I knew with his gesture he meant back in jail. “I never made it to Utopia. My power set doesn’t make it easy to catch me. Not so easy to hold me either,” he giggled. “But once they got me, it wasn’t too hard to keep me down.”

Then his face went dark with rage and he leaned forward, using the shadows and lighting for maximum effect.

“We’ve made certain corrections,” Brutal said. “So it’s not likely to happen again. And those that took such delight in putting me away…well; they’re not so cocky now, are they? Most are at the other end of torture session that didn’t go their way.”

He leaned back, waving off another drink offered to him, and adjusted his tie.

“Sorry,” he said, with a playful glee. “Even I get mad. I hear you get very mad, too. I would give anything to have been a fly on the wall when you put down Lord Mighty. I know, you think I’m mad at you. I’m not. I just regret not having been there to see it. To see his big stupid face in the last few minutes, as he was slowly bleeding out,” he said, growing more and more impassioned as he went on, his voice culminating in a near climax as he finished.

Brutal waved to his off-camera assistant and was handed a curved item that at first I couldn’t identify. The video had moments of blurriness as he shifted to receive the item, but after sitting back in the lights, he held the item up for the audience to see.

It was Mighty’s jawbone.

“I still have my trophy,” he said, his voice twisting into childish glee.

He mocked eating with it, making munching noises, then smiled and tossed it off camera at his aide.

“I was going to thank you for that one, Blackjack. I mean, you spared me a nasty little tumble, and as you probably know now, Mighty wasn’t the nicest guy in the world.”

He shook his head and reached for a cigarette. The aide came on camera, lighting it and walking off. “Thanks, darling,” he said, and took a few drags. “Anyway, I was going to be nice, but this shit you pulled in Brazil isn’t so nice. I have plans, okay? Step one is to deal with the rabble that frothed at the mouth when bad old Brutal went to jail. I’m almost done with that one, just one little bastard that’s tricky to find. But after that I have plans, you see? And I can’t have you and your stalwart team mucking them up.”

He smoked in silence, careless in each pull from the cigarette, blowing the air up into the lights and delighting in the smoky patterns that formed.

“I don’t like doing this, Blackjack, but I have to threaten you and your family. It’s the only way to make sure. An agent of mine will be in the open courtyard of the Sofitel Legend in Amsterdam twenty-four hours from now. My agent will be there for one hour and if you come, they will make contact with you. Come alone,” he said, suddenly serious then just as quickly returned to a whimsical tone. “I won’t be alone, but that’s only because I need people to open the doors and drive me around and whatnot,” he giggled. “If you come, we’ll figure this thing out between us once and for all.”

“If you don’t come,” he said, still lighthearted. “I kill your brother Jason. And his wife. And his two daughters. And his maid. And their two King Charles Spaniels.”

Brutal stared at the camera, smiling, and took a long drag, again toying with the smoke.

“See you tomorrow,” he said and the footage cut out.

I noticed Bubu was looking at me as if I was holding a live grenade.

“Great,” I said. “Like we have time for this.”

“You have to go,” he said, closing the video window.

I walked away, returning to the lab. The stupid printer was still sitting there, churning out my maker machines, slow as hell. I had no time for distractions, regardless of the threat. Haha was after me, probably well on his way to finding out my plans, and this relic from a forgotten age was playing stupid games with my life. Threatening my brother, of all people. It was an unwritten rule that you didn’t fuck with civilians. Then again, it was all over the news these days, heroes and their families getting dragged out of their beds late at night by their former nemesis, murdered in the street.

Bubu came into the room, his eyes on the dusty floor, as if he was trying to find the words.

“I know,” I said, heading him off. “I have to go.”