Blackjack Dead or Alive (The Blackjack Series Book 3) (8 page)

"Is it true that you broke your hands trying to save Apogee?"

I laughed, wondering what the stories were about and handed her my right fist. She took my big paw into her delicate fingers and traced the spider web of scars that wove around the back of my hand.

"Wow," she said.

"Dr. Retcon designed the walls of his inner sanctum to be impregnable,” I said. "He needed privacy for the procedure. See, he was going to coat the whole planet with a kind of energy that would be deadly to the Lightbringers. It was a display of power that, hopefully, would make them change their mind about destroying our planet."

Vandela returned my hand, a bit confused by my rambling. “Anyway, Zundergrub turned on us. He killed Retcon’s daughter, and Retcon snapped.”

"Wait a minute," Annit said as the waiter returned with a replacement bottle. "Isn't it true what they say that heroes aren't able to...you know."

I let the guy refill my glass and took a sip. "We can do anything normals can," I said with a fiendish grin that made them both laugh. "But no, I don’t think we can reproduce. At least that’s what they say. But Dr. Retcon made his daughter in a test tube. She was a clone of his, with select changes to her DNA to make her a female. Retcon's wife had died wanting to have a daughter."

I trailed off, remembering her body lying on the ground at my feet, her lab coat spattered with crimson and her eyes closed, face peaceful. I saw his face in those last moments, the crushing grief turning to despair, the rage overcoming all of his good intentions, spiraling into ugliness. It was an emotion I had since come to know well, a state of blood-curdling, teeth grinding, destructive anger, a release from the troubles of conscience or consequence.

"And what was that thing that happened in the prison," Vandela asked. "And was it you that made that mess in Australia?"

I toasted her, acknowledging my involvement.

"Australia was a mistake," I said. "Dr. Zundergrub wanted me dead, and with the help of Mr. Haha, they tracked me to some isolated outpost in the outback and sent an army after me."

"An army?"

I thought back to the rows of supers waiting for their turn to charge at me, the initial challenge by the famous Russian villain Nevsky. I ended that duel when I bit his cheek off and threw him at the others.

I told them all about it. It was the first time I had really talked about the horrors of that day, and as the story unfolded, I understood why. All of the cheer drained from their faces, and they were both leaning away from me, almost unconsciously. For the first time since Annit had identified me on the train, she looked frightened, and Vandela’s sunny voyeurism had turned to a thin layer of disgust.

I cut the story short, and drank my wine in the awkward silence that followed. I guess it was a long way from spitting in the face of authority figures, like the pompous Epic, to the ruination of bodies, ripping them apart and using limbs as weapons, crushing skulls underfoot, feeling the warm splash of blood across your face.

It was too much for the girls.

My saving grace was the D.C. fight. Lord Mighty had ever been an enigmatic figure, despite his good deeds. Feared as much as respected, it probably didn’t surprise many people that he went dark, but the results were devastating. This tale was obviously why I had been invited, and it was freshest in my mind. I put as much panache into it as I could, and I think that spending most of the fight getting knocked across the district helped soften the near genocide I had committed in Australia. I almost omitted the part where I tore his jaw off, but I could tell they had both seen the video. I left as much to the imagination as I could and the evening was done.

Annit made a show of covering the check, while Vandela sat quietly digesting. The vibrant enthusiasm was gone, her eyes darting to mine without holding contact, and by the time Annit had settled our bill she wouldn’t even do that. I sat rigid in my seat, wary that her skittishness would draw attention to me. Few things drew a crowd faster than a beautiful woman being victimized. Annit nodded at me, the conspiratorial joy replaced with professional stiffness as she laid a gentle hand on Vandela’s shoulder and eased her out of the seat. They left without another word.

I ordered four more bottles of wine and tucked them into my coat pockets, heading back to the hotel. In the wine-induced euphoria, I forgot about the pain in my knees and hips, and walked all the way back.

I awoke to the sound of my hotel door slamming shut. I lay naked on the floor, sunlight flooding through the room’s small rectangular window. I tried standing, but found it easier to crawl to the door, and I saw a woman in a drab gray and white uniform hustling down the hall, pushing a cart full of cleaning supplies and fresh towels in front of her. My brain felt swollen in my skull and my legs trembled as I steadied myself on the door to stand.

That’s when I saw the wrecked remains of my hotel room.

The bed lay in splinters, the mattress torn in half, the metal springs jutting at odd angles from the carcass. The small bureau was cracked down the center, the newly separated halves collapsed on each other holding it in place. In true rock star style, the television was embedded in the wall, the cord dangling like a limp tail from behind it the screen marred with a hole the shape of my fist. There was a crater in the floor, the wood planks shattered, broken nails poking through at dangerous angles. The damage was thorough and structural.

“Shit,” I muttered and stumbled to the bathroom, washing my face and getting my clothes on as fast as I could. As I did, flashes of the previous night came to my mind, the long, angry walk back from the restaurant and the methodical destruction of the hotel room in a fit of rage. I supposed the drunken stupor limit on my super body was four or five bottles of wine.

I hit the street in five minutes and took the first cab I saw. Before heading to the train station, I stopped at a local mall and bought a few bags and some clothing, along with a serious winter coat to keep me warm in the coming cold. In my bag were also some extra bills, a dozen throw away phones to call Annit, and graph paper and pencils to begin the schematic for my super computer, the tool I was going to use to find and catch Mr. Haha once and for all.

Two hours later, I was on a train east. We decided on Romania, simply because it was less chaotic than the Balkan countries, and slightly less violent. I wanted to go into hiding, not into war. The less I was seen or heard of, the better.

I got a private cabin this time, making certain the clerk understood what I meant before handing over the cash, and settled in for the ride to Verona. There I met an associate of Annit’s who handed me a fake Romanian passport with my picture on it. The passport was good enough to pass through customs, or at least that’s what Annit said. I had pretty much bargained my life against her being reliable, and though I doubt she had any illusions about me, her arrangements had been solid and her advice sound.

When the man approached me, I had a fleeting, paranoid moment where I thought the small folded passport would be a badge, and supers of every size and shape would descend on me. She had been pretty horrified the previous night. If the man had noticed my tension, he ignored it, moving through me with a solid bump, kind of a reverse pickpocket move that ended with the new documents slipped into my coat pocket. He slipped past me into the crowded rail station, and I admired his ability to disappear.

I had five trains to take. Milan to Verona – if only to get the fake passport, it was the same train – then Verona to Vienna, Vienna to Budapest, Budapest to Belgrade, Belgrade to Sophia, and finally, Sophia to Bucharest. I was going to visit some of the oldest and most beautiful cities in all of Europe, and I wasn’t going to leave the train stations. But then again, this wasn’t a sightseeing trip. I had to travel incognito. Annit gave me her scarf and glasses and I bought a wool beaner cap that matched my black coat. The passport picture we had taken in Milan was with the same glasses, so the conductors wouldn’t have my full face to look at. All the tickets were bought ahead of time, so I just had to arrive with my Italian passport and pretend to be Giancarlo Del Pierro, my name for the rest of the trip.

I picked up a cheapie laptop with a 3G connection at a loud electronics store in Verona and started my preparations. The initial work would be done on paper, drawing rough-draft schematics. After my first go at it, the cabin was littered with paper filled with engineering designs, the beginnings of the software code, and a growing concern about space. The type of computer server I wanted to build would locate every remote version of Haha, spread around his botnet, in order to crash him all at once. I was probably going to need something in the neighborhood of ten thousand separate computers, each running my special software 24/7 to ferret out each instance of Haha’s code. It was tricky; I had to find every instance of his code without him knowing, then when I was ready, I could drop the hammer, killing the whole thing at once. I had to be thorough, as much as careful or he would escape through a backdoor, rendering the whole exercise useless. Haha was clever, but in the end, he was just a piece of software – designed by someone to fulfill a purpose. The original builder was probably Dr. Retcon, though that was an unsubstantiated hypothesis, and it wasn’t like Haha and I were still on speaking terms. What little code I had looked at didn’t have a signature, or identifying comments for me to trace it back to the old man.

It was strange that he hadn’t tried anything before ambushing the plane. He was nothing if not persistent, and would relish proving his superiority by hounding me, showing that escape was impossible. His promises in the aftermath of the Battle of D.C. aside, I hadn’t heard anything from or about him until his boy attacked the plane. I was supposed to be his star, his muse, but it looked like he had changed his tune. It made sense that he would take the pragmatic route; Blackjack 2.0 was the perfect example of that. If I wouldn’t star in his show; find someone else who would, but to come after me like that? It dripped with resentment, and he didn’t even send anyone back for my body. The sloppiness was equal parts insulting and perplexing. It indicated an evolution in Haha’s code that I would have to account for in a plan that was already a tornado I could barely lasso.

I checked the news on the long journey to Vienna, a clean, plush ride that had all the amenities, including onboard Wi-Fi, but I never saw any mention of the attack on my plane, or any news about my escape. They were keeping it under wraps, probably while they conducted search operations, in hopes of finding survivors. But also in part to keep people from worrying about the big bad that might be loose on the southern coast of Europe.

The loudest bad guy, the one all the news reports were talking about was the fake me. He and his team were making a mess of things all over the world, attacking a pipeline through Kazakhstan, a British oil tanker coming out of Gulf of Aden, and a series of banks in places as widespread as Brasilia, Karachi and Melbourne, Australia. They struck all over the map, but I saw a method to Haha’s madness. He was going after oil and banking interests, attacking those he saw secretly in power – and it was all getting blamed on me.

There were plenty of other villains causing havoc. A conglomerate had formed in the Nordic countries numbering almost fifty, and they were robbing banks and jewelry stores all across France and Belgium. Another smaller group was making trouble on the British Isles. Primal had awoken from one of his decade-long naps and decided he was going to take over the island of Madagascar – with the excuse of protecting the country from deforestation and industrialization. There were others, too, but the news was all about me.

What few heroes were left in Western Europe had gone into hiding, and there was talk of a joint British – French – German project, working with the United Nations to stop the rampant villains. From the news reports, it looked like they were forming a special anti-super unit, with members wearing specialized armor suits that enhanced their strength ten-fold, and made them near invulnerable.

The U.S. had become the Wild West. The list of dead heroes was long, but that wasn’t the worst. A list of secret identities had been made public, resulting in attacks on homes, schools, businesses. The list of casualties numbered in the hundreds, and some heroes had started following their European counterpart’s lead and going into hiding. Others had formed hit squads, and quite a few villains had been killed as well, though none of the heavy hitters were named. In places, the state governor mobilized the National Guard, and the tenor of the articles I read all echoed the same idea: People were terrified. Not that I could blame them. It was one thing to suit up, fight, and die. It was another to see some animal tear your family apart, giggling the whole time, or worse still to see someone you love die as collateral damage. My gut clenched at the idea of being lumped in the same category as those lunatics, but I had done my part earning it.

Africa was relatively safe thanks to Superdynamic’s team, Battle, who roamed the continent and struck with impunity, but the Far East was lost territory. Several countries were now under the despotic rule of villains, including Bangladesh and Thailand, and other nations were under siege, barely holding off the inevitable.

And I was on the shelf.

After the first leg to Vienna, I had to shut off the news, growing more frustrated with the whole situation. They should have given me a shiny new jet, five or six support heroes, and a list. Then I could take care of business, and in a few months we’d have to build a brand new Utopia. Instead they wanted me to be the first inmate.

The irony would have been hilarious if not for the people out there suffering. I had beaten both Epic and Lord Mighty single-handedly. Few villains reached that level, and the rest were fodder. I didn’t need a team, just a pilot and a fancy plane. The streets would be clean in a month, maybe two.

The train pulled into Vienna’s Wien Westbahnhof station, and I gathered my scattered notes and belongings, stuffing them into my duffel bag as the train squeaked to a stop. I was about to leave the cabin when I heard a man barking orders outside of the train. Without understanding a word of German, I knew the guy was a cop. He spoke with authority, the arrogant knowledge that, at least in the moment, his word was law.

Splitting the drapes with my fingers, I looked out and saw my fellow passengers debarking into a rail station immersed in chaos. The man speaking was not a cop, but a soldier wearing a suit of polished black armor, his voice modulated and amplified by his helmet. Not quite the massive suit of powered armor the United Nations was cooking up, but probably a more advanced version of what I had seen on an oil rig a few years ago. Those German commandos had been some tough bastards. I only won that fight because I gave in to rage and desperation. I was lucky this was Austria, though. The Germans would’ve had a proper welcoming committee.

He was armed with a gun that I couldn’t have held in two hands, and flanked by two more armored soldiers who watched impassive as local police led the passengers through roped cordons and off the platform. I jumped at a sudden knock at my door, the muffled voice of a porter speaking in Italian. Again, I didn’t need a translator to understand what he was saying. It was time to get off the train, and they were waiting for me.

“Just a minute,” I said, still peering out the window. The armored soldiers had their backs to me, and were no more than twenty feet away. It would be nothing to rip through the train and hit them before they could recover. There were still dozens of people on the platform, more than enough to sow some disorder once I had dealt with the soldiers. My palms lay flat against the train wall, the thin wooden veneer denting at the slightest flexion of my fingers. Their armor would be thick, but I could kill one before the other two could react. Punch through one, bludgeon the others to death with the corpse.

The knock at my cabin door became more insistent, cutting through the thrum of my coursing blood as it pounded my eardrums. I inhaled through my nose, long and slow, then murmured a curse, donning my flimsy disguise and opened the door. The porter took a step back, and I realized tension was probably bleeding off of me. I took a small step back and said, “I’m sorry, it was a mess in here.”

The porter was quiet a second before saying, “I can help you with your bags?”

His English was accented, but he held his hands out to take my duffel bag. I waved him off and said, “What’s going on out there.” I jerked a thumb over my shoulder, and he put words and motion together quickly.

“Trouble,” he said, and I could see him trying to find the words. “Criminals to rob people, superuomo”

I chewed on that last word for second, connecting the dots. “Super criminals?”

He nodded at that, and our little game of charades seemed to put him at ease. “Yes, the army sent bigger men,” he said, hunching his shoulders and bending his arms in a pretend flex. “My boss says they catch them, but are staying to make sure we are safe.”

Well that was kind, and inconvenient. At least they weren’t here for me. They were just standing right by the train, armed and alert. All I had were a scarf and glasses. Again, I thought about tearing through the train and improvising, but there were still a lot of people milling about, both on the train and in the station. No telling how much collateral damage a fight in the confined train station would generate. If I didn’t want to be confused with the monsters and the animals, it was time to act like it.

The porter had leaned in at the waist, his hands laced formally behind his back. “Signore, can I show you off the train?”

I had no choice but to follow. He offered an outstretched hand for my bag, but I shook my head. He stepped into the hallway with trained grace and held one arm out in guidance. I stepped into a hallway that felt claustrophobic. I steadied my breathing, deep in through the nose, out through the mouth. Annit’s perfume clung to the scarf, a flowery scent that suited her and calmed me. The ever narrowing hallway led to the exit door much faster than it should have. The porter had stayed a professional step behind as we left the cabin, but as the exit came into view, he took a quick step around me.