The Other Eight (26 page)

“Number you’re losing them,” Chloroplast
warned.

The Number turned. His eyes met with his
rival and narrowed in determination. He strutted back toward the
center of the courtyard, Primadonna sashaying toward him until they
were face to face. The music reached a brief pause. When it began
again, he and his dancers executed a complex maneuver. As the song
rolled into its next repetition, she and her dancers countered with
their own. And so began a kind of duel, the two choreographers
raising the bar with each new bit of music, and each time gaining
or losing some dancers. It was a sort of battle of wills, with the
most complex and skillful maneuver recruiting more of the pool of
dancers.

“This is simultaneously the lamest and most
awesome thing I’ve ever seen,” Chloroplast remarked, eyes wide.
“I’m gonna try to tackle Primadonna.”

“No,” huffed The Number as he continued his
routine. “This has been a long time coming. I got this. Help the
others.”

“If you say so. Come on, Gracias. There’s
more important stuff to do.”

“Crap… I really wanted to watch this,” said
his partner, reluctantly turning and rushing into the facility as
the dance-off steadily escalated.

#

“This assignment keeps getting better,”
Private Summers squealed, eyes glued to the monitor for the
courtyard camera. “The Number is really going all out on this
one.”

“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.