Blackjack Dead or Alive (The Blackjack Series Book 3) (21 page)

“The South Pole?”

He laughed, “It’s as remote as it gets. No one out there for me to – you know – play with. The facility was isolated, run by robots, and they kept me busy. Like you, in Utopia. Except their idea was to overload me, strapped to a machine and tied to thousands of inputs at once. Seeing, feeling…all the senses, all at once, like a thousand ants burrowing into your brain.”

Brutal paused, enjoying my grimace.

“I’m sure Senator Asshole had a hand in the design…he’s pretty clever. Clever enough to avoid me these days, I can’t find him anywhere, but don’t worry, my friend, he’s going to get what’s coming to him soon.”

“He heard you were out and hid,” I said.

He nodded, wide-eyed and menacing. “He can’t hide out forever. Not from me.”

“Well, good luck with that,” I said as the waiter returned with my plate, which featured four large scallops, seared and layered with an apricot butter sauce reduction, and a small pile of tiny potatoes and carrots. Enough food for a small child.

I didn’t have to look up to see our exchange wasn’t fun for him any longer.

“You haven’t even heard my offer,” he said.

“I don’t care.”

I ate without much care for manners, but I didn’t make a total pig of myself – except when I smiled at him through a mouthful of the scallops.

“I don’t like being brushed aside, Blackjack.”

In two bites, the whole plate was empty.

“I have my own fish to fry, buddy,” I said, wiping my mouth and taking a long swig of the water. “I don’t have time for you.”

As I stood, he shot up.

“I would be careful, if I were you,” he shouted, calling us to the attention of everyone in the restaurant.

I leaned right into his face.

“Go play your games with the Senator,” I shot back. “It’s none of my business. I don’t give two fucks about the guy.”

“You should,” he said. “He’s the man that ruined your-“

I heard a knock, deep in the table’s cheap wood, and I knew it was an arrow. I could discern an arrow’s impact from pretty much any sound in all of creation. It sat at an angle almost exactly between Brutal and I. The arrowhead was one of my designs, and I had second to recognize it before it exploded.

It was the Nuke.

*              *              *              *

I had only begun to feel the heat from the billowing flames, to see the blinding flash of the forthcoming explosion, when the compression wave hurled me like a kite in a tornado. Engulfed in the massive explosion, I threw my arms up in a futile gesture to shield my face as momentum sent me tearing through several doomed buildings, plowing through brick and concrete until I broke into open air, a flaming missile streaking across the sky.

My parabolic arc sent me crashing into another building, careening through a wall into one of the higher floors, gravity and friction not enough to stall me as I blasted through the floor with enough force to splinter the wooden frame and came to rest on the ground floor. I tried getting up, but the office building gave a great heave as an alarm rung, the foundations grinding from the impact and giving way.

“Oh fuck,” I said, as tiles crashed around me, the roof slanting laterally and sloping onto me.

I raised my arms for cover, again in vain, as the entire building collapsed. Tons of material pinned me, and I barely had time to register the floor buckling as I realized I wasn’t on the bottom floor. With a crack that resonated in my bones, the floor opened into a vast chasm, and I was just another piece of rubble falling through it.

The sound was horrible, a thrumming that shook the ground as the dead building swallowed me, then covered me in tons of rubble. The grinding continued long after I came to rest, and I could only think that other buildings on the block had suffered a similar fate. The flames on my clothing and hair had gone out, and I figured I was bald and eyebrow-less again. That was part of the fun of being Blackjack. But a sort of paralysis had taken me, a numbness that was slowly subsiding, replaced by aching pain all over.

At least I had answered a question that had always bugged me: I could take the nuke. I had designed it with so much explosive that I was never sure I could shoot it far enough to clear of the blast. I had only ever used it as the last ditch effort to stop a tortured man from destroying the Earth. Now it had been used against me, those poor souls in Hotel Sofitel, and who knows how many more.

Above me there was a light scratching, even as more and more material crumpled onto the pile, as if someone was trying to dig me out. Maybe Brutal was trying to help me, though I had no way of knowing if he had survived. Hell, the whole thing might’ve been his idea. He might’ve been working with Haha the whole time, and what better way to draw me out of my little hole in the ass-end of the world than to threaten my family? Being the naïve idiot I am, I walked right into the trap.

I was still numb which was bad. It might be the nascent moments of shock, a reaction to the overwhelming trauma. My cells would slowly start dying as my body shunted blood to my vital organs. With my enhanced stamina, I had a few minutes, maybe. Taking stock, I didn’t think I had been impaled, which was a wonder, but the trade-off was being sandwiched between two huge, flat surfaces.

I was in a terrible position; my legs splayed out to the sides and dangling. I felt a burst of empathy for the Wicked Witch of the East, and barked a laugh, inhaling all sorts of toxic silt that sent me into a fit of coughing. The scratching above me became more persistent, so I steadied my breathing, inhaling through my nose, exhaling through my mouth and tried to move my arms. Here I had gotten luckier, in my attempts to shield against the rubble; my arms had ended up tucked beneath me at forgiving angles.

I was lacking leverage, but raw strength was enough to create some space to move. The real trick was not shattering the fragments I lay upon. That would cause another collapse that would likely finish me. I tested my legs and found them whole and free, but dangling, my toes scraping a ledge no more than a foot below. That was bad. I was already weakened and battered, and I didn’t think I had enough strength to move the mass on top of me with upper body strength alone.

Tensing my legs, I did a push up, a stream of light breaking into the newly opened space, motes of dust and ground concrete illuminated in the dark space. I felt weight settle on my legs, heavier than what was above me, but I looked between my legs and saw enough space to wedge them beneath me. I was tempted to lower myself, but was afraid of dislodging more rubble, so I locked my elbows and started working my legs.

I started with my right, which felt less encumbered, though something had snagged the boot’s tough leather. I rolled it out, feeling a tear as I moved it laterally, trying to figure out if the space widened. My plan was to find a larger crease to slip the leg through and get a knee under me. My tendons creaked as the leg reached the point of maximum extension, but I thought my plan had a chance.

Bending at the knee, I brought the leg in, arching my back to make some more space. The pile lifted, and I tried to quickly snake my leg underneath me when I heard a crack from above, and felt more rubble crash onto the pile. The impact knocked my hands from under me, and I barely got my elbows underneath me, and ended up in a planking position, weight on my elbows, back straight. The plank position immediately put immense stress on my core, the muscles there swelling as they tensed with the effort, which amounted to keeping roughly a foot of space between my face and the surface beneath me.

Worse still, I felt weight pressing against my ankle, and when I wiggled it, there was no give. I tried pulling the foot through and accomplished little more than shifting the detritus collected above me. My breathing was coming in hurried gasps, and I felt my throat spasm as I coughed up a syrupy string of gray black ichor. Letting it dribble out of my mouth, I opened my clenched fists, and lay them flat again and pushed.

Nothing happened at first, the quivering of my muscles the only sign that I was exerting any force at all. I tried to pull my foot through and it also did not move. Sweat dripped from every pore, pooling with the silty spit, and that pain started radiating outward from my hips again, except this time I wasn’t trying to stroll through a train station. Razors sheared at muscle, tendon, and ligament with equal fervor, and I felt my palms start to slide against the rough surface below.

I could hear my heart beating in my ear, and I counted off a dozen ticks. Still no movement, and what’s more, I could hear more debris crumbling from above, waiting for its chance to increase my burden.

Stupid! How could I be so stupid? Facebook. What the fuck was I thinking? I basically sent Haha a text with my location. It was the same thing, over and over. I got arrogant, and then I got sloppy. I sure as shit showed that old gangster who was boss, though. He was probably laughing at me from hell, cleaning off the seat next to him for my impending arrival.

More weight shifted above, but it sounded like rubble was being cleared. I didn’t hear any voices, but the movement sounded closer. I couldn’t hold this position forever, but they would hit a point where they would have to stop and bring in the heavy equipment to continue. I would be long dead by then, from asphyxiation, if nothing else.

No. Fuck no. I was not going to die like this. Haha would not beat me. Bearing down, I heaved, bucking at the crushing weight. I heard a crack from below, but my relative flooring held as the weight above shifted again.

“Come on,” I said through a groan, the pain still trying its best to deflate me. I yanked my foot through the crease, and felt something crackle and pop as it edged through. My thigh lay flat at an odd angle, but I was able to wiggle my toes with minimal pain, and using the space I already created, squeezed it under me, the knee and thigh both creaking as they stretched past their safe capacity.

Pain and relief mingled as I was able to balance some of the weight onto my leg and hip. That small pivot was enough to extend my arms all the way, and return to my initial push up pose. With my knee under me, I was able to arch my back further, the weight above sliding as I attempted to get my other foot under me. Turning the ankle, I tried to wiggle it through the space, but the edges of my huge boot held it prisoner. My groan matured to a scream of rage as I lifted higher, the awkward angle costing me power. I felt some of the load slide backwards, a loose piece striking my foot with enough force to render it numb. I ignored the blooming pain, filing it away with the mind rending agony still emanating across my hips and back, and feeling a little give, forced my foot through, the seams tearing around the sole of my boot.

Finally afforded a chance to use my strength to its full potential, I used my legs and back to hold the section of wall as I brought my arms up and dug my fingers into the concrete that it was composed of. I heard more rubble coming loose from above and powered to a standing position, the concrete giving way to my left and right, broken wings of the stuff snapping off and spilling tons of rubble around me.

What remained was shaped like an uneven diving board, and was much easier to manage, providing me with some shielding against the rubble that came crashing down from above. I looked past it and saw sunlight pouring from a hole the size of a basketball. Between my efforts and whoever was helping me out there, a decent sized cavity had been hollowed out. Using my remaining strength, I lay the plank against the inside wall the basement I had fallen into and digging handholds along its length, climbed toward the sun.

The hole widened again, gloved hands pulling away more rubble, and I whooped in joy. The makeshift ramp shuddered under my weight, suffering from its own trauma, and with about ten feet to spare, I tensed, my finger indented deeply into the sturdy concrete, and then jumped. I cleared the ten feet easy as the concrete split in two, falling to join the remainder of the crap below.

I punched through the hole, tumbling to the ground in a roll, coming to rest in a tangle of limbs. The sun burned bright above me; the air was tinged with the powdered concrete and ash, but still tasted sweet. I got to my knees, trying to stand when I saw an outstretched hand. I took it without looking, my eyes still adjusting to the lack of darkness. I was about to voice my thanks when I looked up and saw it was Blackjack 2.0

“You,” I said, but he was readying a furious haymaker, intent on taking my head off.

I pulled him towards me hard, making him swinging wide and managed to sidestep the blow without much grace. My muscles were dough, but I managed to dig my boot against a fallen beam and loop a fist that caught him flush in the face. He flew away from me, through a partially collapsed structure nearby and was lost from sight.

I fired my rocket boots and pursued, hoping the torn sole would hold, and watched him storm through the pile of rubble. I finally got a good look at him and I saw it was me. Or rather, a version of me while I had been one of the Impossibles. He was wearing my old costume, with the face cover and goggles. This was the first suit I had ever worn, before we found the costume-making machine on Dr. Retcon’s Rocket Flyer. It was a simple tactical rig designed for minimum fuss, head-to-toe black, with a chest harness loaded to bear with gadgets.

I landed next to him, and grabbing a handful of his tactical rig in one hand, lifted him.

“Who are you,” I demanded, but his attention was fixed over my shoulder.

I felt it before I saw it, like a thousand tiny pinpricks assaulting me. Still holding Blackjack 2.0, I turned my head and saw a green-white glow peaking. It started as a candle in the dark, flaring brighter until it eclipsed the early afternoon sun, encompassing the whole city as it radiated from its flashpoint in a huge, perfect sphere. At the nexus of the sphere was Brutal, carried aloft by the energies at his command, basking in the glory of his birthright.

From below, I could see he was being attacked, though it didn’t look like anything was getting through. He roared; his voice amplified to the point where I heard its full thunder, bellowing his insane rage. Around me, I heard thousands echoing his bellow, but in pain not rage, the collective agony of a city dying. I saw him clench his fists, and arch his back in mid-air as Amsterdam perished in a thousand streaks of green-white light drawn towards Brutal.

He didn’t move as the streaks converged on him, and I understood his power, why descriptions of it were always vague recounting and nebulous theory. He absorbed life force, adding it to his own reserve of power. I felt Blackjack 2.0 spasm in my hands and turned to see green-white light streaming from him, his face strained with pain, but making no sound. I let him fall to the ground as I saw Brutal’s power also affecting me. The same power that was killing my impersonator was barely harming me.

“Dear God,” I said as I reflexively moved towards Blackjack 2.0. I let my guard down as the man dressed in my clothes curled up into the fetal position, his pain obvious. The effect suddenly ended and I turned to see Brutal’s new sun fade to nothing as he flew towards the horizon.

He had killed the whole city.

I turned to see Blackjack 2.0 roll to his feet. He feinted for a gut punch, lashing out at his real target, my groin. The shot lacked any power, which was good because I didn’t want my balls mashed to jelly, but it was still enough to double me over. He followed it up with a straight kick that caught me in the chest, knocking me on my back and sending me skidding across the asphalt until a pile of rubble stopped me.

“What the fuck,” I said as he reached into one of his pouches. If his set up mirrored mine, he was grabbing for an incendiary charge. Reaching behind me, I grabbed the heaviest thing I could find and hurled it at him. It was a piece of concrete that rotated as it sped at him. Slow to respond, the missile caught him in the chest, exploding into dust and rubble as he flew backwards.

I threw myself at him, pinning him beneath me. He caught my arms and tried to wrestle me off, but even in my weakened condition I was much stronger than him.

“Just you and me now, buddy.”

He kept trying to grapple with me, but I forcibly kept him on his back. Whatever leverage that provided wasn’t enough to overpower me, but he continued to struggle.

“Why are you doing this,” I shouted. “Why are you pretending to be me?”

I already knew the answer. Who he was didn’t matter; he was doing this on Haha’s behalf, probably for a lot of money. This guy was a hired gun; a nobody with few powers and a minimal grasp of archery.

I was going to break his forearms. I was going to rip his arms off and hang him by one of the nearby light poles as an example to Haha. I turned my grip on his arms, wrenching them in the process, pulling them tight to might chest and dug my knees into his stomach. I was going to crack this bitch in half.

I tugged with all my strength, but succeeded only in pulling him closer to me. He wasn’t even resisting.

I looked down and saw his eyes through the goggles. He didn’t seem afraid at all. Something had shifted in our fight and I was ignorant to it. It wasn’t the pain that clued me in. I had been ignoring that constant buzz for a long while. It was the sense of being drained. I could feel my strength ebbing, and not in a natural way. This had nothing to do with lactic acid buildup in my muscles, nor Brutal’s attack. I felt Blackjack 2.0 reversing my hold on his arms.

I was about to say something when he tossed me off him, but I managed to keep my feet. He leapt up with an acrobatic grace I could never have managed; following up with a spinning kick so fast I never saw it.

The kick sent me hurtling through the air, but I was able to twist my lower body and engage my rocket boots, slowing my fall. I readjusted midair with the intent of getting some altitude when I saw the thruster burn of his rocket boots as he powered at me. He tackled me, his shoulder digging deep into my guts, engaging the boots in a flash of speed that sent us crashing through the window of a nearby office building.

He kept his tight hold as we hit the floor, using me to absorb the impact, propelling us across the room, my back digging up floor tiles and concrete until we collided with the wall. My muscles were on fire and I felt so weak. He stood up and I tried to match him, but couldn’t. He hefted me with ease and lobbed me through the roof of the building.

I spun awkwardly through the air as I reached the zenith of my ascent. I tried to bring my rocket boots to bear again, but my doppelganger was there. He had flown above me, but all I saw was the heel of his boot as he dropped from above. I barely had time to register the exploding pain in my face and chest as the axe heel kick drove me downwards, through one of Amsterdam’s dozens of stone bridges and into the canal.

Inky black water encompassed me, but I didn’t stop falling until my back hit the canal’s rough stone bottom. The shift in pressure played havoc with my ears, and my lungs burned from lack of oxygen. The water was foul, pushing up my nose and sneaking into my mouth. I’m not going to lie, I panicked, toggling the rocket boots and riding along the canal bed for a few feet before I angled my thrust and shot out of the water. I landed in a pile, gasping for air while sputtering to expel the water I had swallowed.

I felt the push from his boots as he landed next to me. I stood to meet him, and he fired a series of powerful kicks that caught me flush in the stomach and chest. I lifted my hands to block, but he adjusted with a snap kick to my knee that dropped my guard. He followed with a kick to my stomach that drove me to a knee, dry heaving.

“Why?” I managed, but he lashed out with a full-bodied kick that sent me skipping like a rock across a pond. I tumbled into a park warping a small metal gate and trampling grass, until I smacked into a statue. Robbed of my momentum, I lay there unable to move. My legs weren’t following commands, my muscles were twitching in disparate rhythm, my breath was coming in hitches, and I was tasting blood mixed with silt and scallops. I saw him flying towards me, growing larger in my vision, and tried to stand again. He landed a few steps from me, and I couldn’t even hold my arms up as he approached.

“I’m going to-” I started, but he didn’t let me finish, kicking me in the face, his shin landing squarely across the bridge on my nose, rocking me against the statue. The sound of stone cracking was a dull firecracker, and he took a step back at it toppled over onto me. It broke into another couple of pieces as it smashed onto my limp form.

He came up to me, and with his fists clasped tight drove an overhead punch into hunk of stone that lay over my face, cracking it into shards. Clods of dirt and grass swallowed me as the blow drove me into the soft earth. He dug me out and pressed me back against the base of the statue with his left hand and lined up a spinning kick that swiveled my head almost clean off my shoulders.

“Who are you?” I roared, but he didn’t respond, picking me up. My dead weight was nothing to him.

I thought he would answer his own question, but instead, he slugged me once, twice, three times. Each shot was a jackhammer, and I could feel my face warping under the pressure. One eye was swollen shut, but through the slit of the other, I could see blood coating his glove.

He let me go and I crumpled to the soft grass.

I wanted to say something, but my jaw felt like it was dislocated and a mouthful of congealed blood dribbled out.

He grabbed a piece of broken statue the size of a boulder, holding it overhead. I looked up and saw an open flap on his tactical rig. One thought mobilized in my addled, concussed brain, shining with the clarity of a lighthouse at midnight.

Incendiary.

With my last bit of remaining energy, I reached up, my hand slipping into that pocket with a familiarity earned through repetition. He swung the boulder at me, but my move disrupted his aim and I took the shot on my hip and back. It was excruciating, but I wasn’t dead and the rubble lay around me in harmless pebbles.

He stepped back, unaware of what I was doing. I turned to him and smiled the grenade in hand. His expression turned, and riding the last of my adrenaline, I closed the distance between us, driving my shoulder deep into his stomach. He braced and did not move, so with my left hand I grabbed his belt and pulled, creating a small gap in his waistband, and with the other, I engaged the grenade and dropped it down his shorts.

I hadn’t let go of him when it exploded in Thermate-TH3 fury, bathing both of us in flames. The wisps of my remaining clothing caught fire, but most of the blast caught his bare skin, searing it an angry, pulsating red. Blackjack 2.0 howled in pain, every inch of skin from nipple to knee a charred black wasteland.

“Oh, so you can speak,” I said, as he fell into a quivering heap. I didn’t wait to see if he recovered. Activating my rocket boots, I flew away, and did not look back.

The landscape zipped by as I flew away from my doppelganger, but I had no idea where I was. The phone and its GPS app were fragments in what was left of my last pair of decent jeans, and while my instinct was to ascend high enough to gather my bearings, the inconsistent flow of thrust coming from my right boot made that a dicey option at best. Flying and falling were normally not a chore for me, but it was taking an immense amount of effort, physically and mentally, to navigate in a straight line.

I found a tall building and eased into the landing, but my legs and knees burned as they absorbed the jolt. I bent at the waist; a light breeze causing sweat I didn’t even know was there to tingle. It was a balm to my aching body, but I couldn’t lose myself in the comfort. I was pretty sure my doppelganger was dead, but he had friends who were no doubt looking for me. Rising to my full height, I looked over the building’s edge and found a charnel house.

Hotel Sofitel was gone, swallowed in a crater that was no less than a thousand feet in diameter at the outside edges. It was all gone, and the crater was deep enough that water was leaking into it, resulting in a newborn lake right in the center of Amsterdam. That wasn’t the worst of it. Turning my gaze to the street, I found a small line of cars piled atop each other at odd angles. More than one had run through a building, and thick smoke made it hard to see, but they were there.

The bodies.

I jumped off the edge of the building, using the boots to slow my fall. I hit the ground, ignoring the pain, my gut clenching as I tried to keep the last of its contents from spilling onto the street. Smoke poured out of buildings up and down the street, the fires that birthed them raging unabated. I walked over to the first body I saw, a thin, older man wearing a suit that had rumpled from his awkward position. It looked like he had been mid-step when he died; his right leg was bent at an unnatural angle. I turned him over gently, straightening him into a less painful looking pose, though pain meant nothing to the guy anymore. Hazel eyes stared blankly at the sky, the pupils unreactive as I checked his throat for a pulse, knowing it was futile.

Pinching the bridge of my nose, one hand still resting on the dead man, I wanted to fly away, back to Romania, anywhere else, really. But I made myself look. I stood and took in the scene, imprinting it on a memory that too often overlooked or ignored consequences. Dozens, probably hundreds of bodies littered the street, dead without trauma, their lives snuffed out in a flash of green, indiscriminate of criteria. I was responsible for this. Brutal was a bomb left out in the open, and given the chance to defuse it, I had pressed his buttons. It wasn’t bad enough that I antagonized him during our meeting, with no understanding of his abilities or temperament, but I had, in essence, attacked him.

Jason.

There was no chance he didn’t go after Jason. The hotel had been an hour away from the airport by cab, but I could cover it in less than ten minutes with the boots. I still had no idea where the airport was, though. I emptied my pockets, the cellphone coming out in three big chunks of useless glass and plastic. Desperation was starting to set in, and I was about to take off and find my own way when I looked down at the dead man. Without hesitation, I went through his pockets, finding the phone in his coat. It wasn’t even damaged. I entered the name of the airport and was rewarded with driving direction. All I needed was a direction.